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CIRCA ART MAGAZINE EDITOR Peter FitzGerald INTERNATIONAL EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Elizabeth Aders BOARD Orla Ryan, James Kerr, Ken Langan, Peter Monaghan (Chair), Darragh Hogan, Isabel Nolan, Mark Garry, Graham Gosling, Tara Byrne CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Alannah Hopkin (), Luke Gibbons (), Brian Kennedy (), Shirley MacWilliam (England) EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD (this issue) Orla Ryan, Darragh Hogan, Isabel Nolan, Peter FitzGerald CIRCA is concerned with visual culture. We welcome comment, proposals and written contributions. Please contact the editor for more details, or consult our website (www.recirca.com). All enquiries CIRCA, 43 / 44 Temple Bar, Dublin 2; Tel / fax (+353 1) 679 7388; [email protected] Assistants: Elaine Cronin, Claire Flannery, Rosa Tomrop- Hofmann, Simona Pompili, Min Jung Kim Printed by W & G Baird Ltd, Belfast Opinions expressed in this magazine are those of the authors, not necessarily those of the Board. CIRCA is an equal-opportunities employer. Copyright © CIRCA 2005 ISSN 0263-9475 For our subscription rates please see bookmark, or visit www.recirca.com, where you can subscribe online. CIRCA 112summer 2005

EDITORIAL 19 UPDATE 20

FEATURE ARTICLES and the Art of Dispossession 24 Mining a Quarry: Stabat Mater by Dorothy Cross 34 The Multitude: and at the 2005 Venice Biennale 38 Disciplining te Avant Garde the United States versus the Critical Art Ensemble 50 Portraiture and Social Context – A Case Study 60

REVIEWS Carlow: The Institute of Potential, Art and Failure 67 : Jacqueline Saloum at Void Gallery 70 Letterkenny: Caroline McCarthy: WindowWall 72 Limerick: ev+a 74 Clonmel: Ann Mulrooney and Ciara Healy at STAC 78 Herzliya: The Belfast Way at Herzliya Museum of Art 80 Dublin: Isabel Nolan at Project 82 Dublin: Madeleine Moore at Pallas Heights 84 Dublin: Mark Manders at Irish Museum of Modern Art 86 Belfast: Cahal McLaughlin at Catalyst 88 London: Mairéad McClean at University of Greenwich 90 Limerick: Mark O’Kelly (and Sarah Pierce) at Limerick City Gallery of Art 92 Limerick: Mark O’Kelly at Limerick City Gallery of Art 94 Dublin: Royal Art Lodge at 96 Art Spiegelman: In the Shadow of No Towers 98 Belfast:Visonic at Ormeau Baths Gallery 100 Cork:Visual Practices across the University at Lewis Glucksman Gallery 102

Front cover: Mark O’Kelly: New Amsterdam, oil on linen, 2004; see reviews, pp. 92 – 95 EDITORIAL

It’s a sign that you’re on to something big when your ing how society has so many apparent prescriptions and computers turn against you. So it was with this issue: as proscriptions surrounding who may be portrayed and the deadline for going to print approached, first one, then displayed. another, then a third of our trusty Macs abandoned contact with their hard disks. They took internet access with them. Then there’s the biggest article, ’s piece on the It’s a mystery how the inanimate is so intuitive –-the way coming Venice Biennale. Few who were at the opening of computers know to delete dissertations as the due date the last Biennale will ever forget it. Never mind the surreal looms, or even humble hangers gather into snarly piles. beauty of the city, the lapping of water instead of the noise of cars, the pleasure of being in Italy once again. In forty- Perversely, then, we’re emboldened by our hardware hang- degree heat, the opening days seemed to be as much about ups. The changes we’re planning must be worth the effort. survival as about art. This time round, Venice might as well With this issue, the emphasis is on new types of content. be about Ireland, so large is the delegation of artists heading We’re carrying fewer reviews, but they’re longer: we felt in its direction. For the first time, Northern Ireland will a growing need to let our writers go into greater depth. have its own pavilion, and Commissioner Hugh Mulholland Something similar has happened with the feature articles. has put together a fascinating list of artists and events. For Again, we felt a more expansive, more profound approach the Republic of Ireland, a relatively old hand at Venice by would yield dividends. now, Commissioner Sarah Glennie has chosen slightly fewer artists, but the emphasis seems again to be on reflecting the Theming has also gone. It’s something that CIRCA has used strength and diversity of artistic practice. in the past; it seems to play itself out after a while, having served its purpose. We are now publishing a mix of feature Behind the scenes, and at the risk of giving our computers articles, ‘magazine style’. And that means we’re open to apoplexy, much more is afoot at CIRCA. We now have an submitted texts, or ideas for texts - please approach us. Editorial Advisory Panel. The Panel discusses and helps in the decision about what art events to review and what It’s a pleasure to print here two articles on Dorothy Cross. feature articles to commission. (Panel members are excluded Ask any art student here to name one artist from Ireland, from promoting coverage of events with which they are and Cross’ name is likely to be first on most tongues. Her personally involved.) And we are firmly hoping that the commitment to artistic endeavour, the resonance of her September issue of CIRCA will reflect another major change: work with its audience both here and internationally, and we are outsourcing a redesign of the look of the magazine, the sheer quality of her output easily justify the inclusion of and dying to see the result. In that regard, an online poll on these texts. We have timed them to coincide with a major recirca.com has been very useful in guiding our decisions retrospective on Cross at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. – many thanks to the very many who responded. We are also carrying a long text by Gregory Sholette on another very committed artist, Steve Kurtz, and the Kurtz / One or two last thoughts: don’t miss our forthcoming book, CAE affair. For ‘affair’ perhaps read ‘tragedy’:an artist who Space:Architecture for Art, to be published in June; it’s should have been allowed to mourn his wife found himself edited by Gemma Tipton and promises to be a stunner. For a instead the centre of paranoid bioterrorism charges. The limited period, if you take out a two-year subscription to the affair is unfolding in upstate New York, but it seems to tell us magazine you will receive this book absolutely free. At the a great deal about the world in which we are now living; it’s same time you can enter into our subscription prize-draw, not reassuring. and possibly win an original, CIRCA-commissioned painting by Geraldine O’Neill. Art and politics also mixed when Michael O’Dea’s portrait of the murderer of Veronica Guerin was shown at the Royal If you are reading this, it is because the computers have Hibernian Academy in 2003. Maggie Deignan’s text here allowed it; perhaps they are appeased for now. Enjoy the takes us through media reaction at the time, attempting to magazine. understand what it was that caused so much outrage. Read it, and you may see portraiture in a new light; it’s surpris- Peter FitzGerald

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 19 UPDATE

Louise Bourgeois gift

The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, announced on 17 May a surprising addition to its collection. As a result of IMMA’s Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time exhibi- tion in 2003 / 2004, Bourgeois has gifted Untitled, 2001, shown here. According to the press release, it “…is one of the artist’s character- istic front-facing fabric heads, which is displayed in a glass vitrine. The head is one of a suite of seven, each unique, made from a soft pink material, originally one of Bourgeois’ jackets. The work, including the vitrine, measures just over 177 cms in height.”

IMMA hopes to have the Bourgeois work on display by the end of the year.

Louise Bourgeois: Untitled, 2001; courtesy Irish Museum of Modern Art

Beuys query the 1970s and ’80s. He is looking to make contact with anybody who has a personal memory of Joseph Beuys, the towering figure of postwar German Beuys from this period. He can be contacted at art, was also a frequent visitor to Ireland, where he was [email protected] or by phone at +353 apparently in the habit of turning up unexpectedly at 87-2825960 or c/o 10 Caragh Road, Dublin 7. various art colleges. CIRCA has received the following : So if you have any personal recollections to do with the Documentary filmmaker Donnacha Ó Briain master of fat and felt, you know what to do. is currently researching a film on Joseph Beuys’ involvement in Ireland and the Celtic regions in

20 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 UPDATE

‘Culture Ireland’, to which artists can apply if they have a show or other event abroad. Oddly, even though the camera viewpoint Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon comes under the same department as Culture Ireland, the two bodies seem to have different rules in relation to Northern Ireland: Culture Ireland apparently takes applications from artists sky resident in Northern Ireland, while the Arts Council takes applications from artists from the Republic who are sea resident anywhere in the whole world except Northern Ireland.

What follows is a list of some recent funding decisions; it’s an interesting measure of the diversity of artistic activity being sent abroad from Ireland. G rac e We ir: w o rking drawing f o r The clearing; court esy the artist

Four artists join Aosdána Kate Hennessy: art exhibition in London in November / December 2005: €1,800 Queen Street Studios, Belfast: Ruth Mc McCullough exhibition in Grace Weir, John Noel Smith, James McCreary and Anita Spain in May / June 2005: €3,150 Groener have been elected to Aosdána, the “affiliation Greg Long: participation in the Florence Artist Biennale in December € of creative artists in Ireland” under the aegis of the Arts 2005: 1,500 Patrick Walshe: participation in the Florence Artist Biennale in Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon. The vote to induct the December 2005: €1,500 four was taken at the annual General Assembly on 3 May. Lucy Doyle: participation in the Florence Artist Biennale in December 2005: €1,500 Benjamin Elves: participation in the Florence Artists Biennale in One of the most significant aspects of being in Aosdána December 2005: €1,500 is access to the ‘cnuas’: “Members of Aosdána may avail, Linda O’Keeffe: participation at a symposium and exhibition of sound € under certain conditions, of the Cnuas – an annual Arts in Canada in May 2005: 1,250 € Mick O’Shea: participation a Cork / Japan Residency Programme in Council stipend valued at over 12,000 designed to enable Japan in May / June 2005: €2,500 the artists to devote their energies fully to their work.” – Irene Murphy: participation a Cork / Japan Residency Programme in € according to the Arts Council’s web page on the Assembly, Japan in May / June 2005: 2,500 Graphic Studio Dublin: exhibiting at the London Original Print Fair where you can also read the biographies of the elected at the Royal Academy of Art, London in April 2005: €6,000 artists (click on the link under ‘News & Events’). : participation at Art Fairs in Basel: €10,000 Helen O’Leary: artist in residence for one month and exhibition in Australia in July / August 2005: €1,400 Taxing Sarah Glennie, Irish Curator for Venice Biennale 2005: supplementary funding for the Biennale: €30,000 The cnuas is all the more enticing, perhaps, given the Gráinne Hassett: participation in an Architectural exhibition in Tokyo in April 2005: €2,000 current worry that the Republic’s ‘artist’s tax exemption’ Meav Lenaghan: participation at the International Print Biennial of – the waiver on income tax for registered artists on their Trois Rivières in Canada in June € artistic output –-may be under threat. It may be capped, 2005: 1,000 Dorothy Cross: exhibition in McMullen Museum in Boston from April or abolished, or left as is; the relevant government to June 2005: €3,000 minister, John O’Donoghue, recently appealed to artists to James Ryan: Irish participation in proposed exhibition of Irish Art in € be active in speaking up for the exemption, presumably to China September to November / December 2005: 5,000 Niamh McCann: exhibition in Finland in October / November 2005: strengthen his hand at cabinet. €2,337 Richard Gorman: exhibition of woodblock prints and etching in Japan € Meanwhile, O’Donoghue’s department continues to be in October 2005: 2,363 Anne Holland: artist in residence programme in Switzerland in July / flaithiúlach in the distribution of funds to artists from August 2005: €450 Ireland with ambitions to show abroad. There is now Sculptors’ Society of Ireland: promoting launching and presenting a € a reconstituted ‘Cultural Relations Committee’, called special addition of Printed Project at the Venice Biennale: 3,750

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 21 UPDATE

Willie Doherty takes a chair

Two-time Turner Prize nominee Willie Doherty has been appointed Professor of Video Art at the University of Ulster. Doherty’s work, primarily video installations and photographs addressing the complexities of living in divided societies, has been widely exhibited and duly acclaimed in Ireland and further afield. His most recent work, entitled Non-specific threat, will be Paul Doran at the award ceremony in the , Dublin; photo Shane O' Neill / shown in this year’s Venice Jason Clarke Photography Biennale.

Doran wins AIB Prize Intensely involved in the development of the arts Paul Doran is the winner of this year’s AIB Prize. The Prize is always associated with in Ireland, Doherty has a show in the gallery that nominates the artist for the award. According to the press been a member of the Arts release: Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon since 2003 and a Doran, born in Gorey, Co. Wexford in 1972, was nominated by the Sligo Art member of the Arts and Gallery. He graduated in Fine Art Painting, from the National College of Art and Humanities Research Design, Dublin, in 2001. His work is the result of an intense commitment and a Board Peer Review College passion for the act of laying paint on canvas. since 2004.

Doran wins a prize of E20,000 to cover the publication of a catalogue, a contribution towards the costs of an exhibition in Sligo Art Gallery in 2006 and an award to the artist to facilitate production of new work for the exhibition.

Some Board changes at CIRCA

We are very pleased to welcome Tara Byrne, Director of the National Sculpture Factory, Cork, onto the Board of CIRCA. We are also very pleased that Declan Sheehan, of the Context Gallery, Derry, and artist and curator Georgina Jackson have agreed to join our Editorial Advisory Panel.

Image of Willie Doherty courtesy University of Ulster

22 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 UPDATE

Harald Szeemann – Obituary Today, Szeemann’s thinking may strike one as too much of a master narrative, a total work of art, following his own show If you’ve been enriched by seeing challenging art exhibitions on the Inclination towards a Gesamtkunstwerk, 1983, which over the last few decades, you owe Harald Szeemann a great proposed the tendency as a crucial characteristic of European deal – whether you’ve heard his name before or not. He was art production. The Bachelor Machines project, departing the person for whom the label ‘artist curator’ was invented and from Duchamp’s Large glass, pursued that intensity into the who was almost single-handedly responsible for raising to by erotic, more especially male auto-eroticism. However, the now near-gigantic proportions the profile but also the obliga- female is also present, linked with the wisdom of Monte Verità tions of the curator. (subtitled “Le mammelle della verità”). That mountain was an artist colony in the early twentieth century, where inhabitants His first claim to fame was to show, as the director of the Berne and visitors practised vegetarianism, life reform, eurythmics, Museum, American Minimalists with some now-canonical anarchism and the like. Apart from a 1980 exhibition on that European (e.g., the Vienna Actionists) in the legendary exhibi- mountain near his residence in Tessin, Szeemann planned a tion When Attitudes Become Form, 1969. However, he had museum that might have come close to his ever-illusive but already moved a few goalposts, for example, by mounting possibly accumulative Museum of Obsessions. Szeemann’s the first museum show of Art Brut / self-taught art (what is obsessions were not dogmatic but sought freedom; they were now referred to as ‘Outsider Art’). One could conclude that, total, rather than totalitarian. in Ireland especially, his legacy is alive. Artists’ and nonartists’ attitudes kept inspiring Szeemann over the next three and a The fact that he curated the second and third-last Venice half decades of exhibition-making. He considered himself a Biennales, however, may look as though an independent spirit servant of artists. He facilitated and did decidedly more: the was going safe or established. But he had a vested interest: intensity that he searched for in others, he himself delivered. Szeemann had established and directed for almost a decade and a half the ‘young’ counter-exhibition in Venice, Aperto. What was once was a diet of one-man shows, national and Now Appertutto entered the establishment – for a short and period surveys of art exploded at documenta 5 in 1972. Now suitably subversive time. That openness is and always was for freelance by conviction, Szeemann developed what was the first Szeemann about the viewers, making things possible for us – at large-scale thematic exhibition. It had a utopian undertone great personal expense. and included self-taught pieces, science-fiction comics and individual mythologies with the inclusion of Joseph Beuys. He had to conserve energies by not answering mail over the That documenta made history – and since then, Beuys became last few years, but he kept his archive open for researchers into the documenta artist. all possible aspects of contemporary art practice. That is where he himself had begun: Szeemann did not just gain entrance to Szeemann’s choices soon became canonical, but he didn’t turn his profession by knowing artists or being one, he had done an to safe bets. While his circle of friends from the early days kept art-historical Ph.D. involving the French writer Alfred Jarry. being included when it suited, he chose his grandfather as the One of his legacies is, therefore, to prove that academics can be topic of an intimate show; he travelled, for example to China creative – ‘artist curators’. as much as ten years ago – and found intensity aplenty. He gave people a chance, including the present author. As merely Harald Szeemann had agreed in principle to curate ev+a an MA student I could contribute to three high-profile publi- in Limerick. But he also said that the Museum of Obsessions cations, his Beuys retrospective catalogues, Zurich (where he project would keep him curating until the year 3000. was an affiliated freelance curator), Madrid and Paris (Centre Unfortunately, his plans were cut short by some 995 years. Pompidou), 1993/4. When I spent some months in Zurich two We’re all the much poorer for his sad departure to a more years later, I visited an exhibition of work by his wife, the artist intense, obsessive place. Ingeborg Lüscher. Among her characteristic sulphur and black works, she showed some photographs. Initially quite abstract, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes is Lecturer in Historical and they emerged as close-ups of ejaculations. Intensity, indeed. Theoretical Studies in Visual Art, University of Ulster, Belfast.

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 23 DOROTHY CROSS AND THE ART OF DISPOSSESSION

Four exhibitions of the work of Dorothy Cross in the spring and summer of 2005 provide the opportunity for an overview of the diverse career of this prominent inter- national artist. A retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, a survey of site-specific projects at McMullen Museum in Boston, a show of new work entitled L’Air at Frith Street Gallery in London, and Cross’s collaboration with Fiona Shaw on monte notte for the Cork 2005 culture festival – all illustrate the strength of her past work and her ongoing creative process.1

The dynamic evolution of her career over the past twenty years makes it difficult to categorize an artist like Cross. Simon Morley has described her as an “artist of the ‘optical unconscious’”2 who explores the blindspots that distort human perception. She has also been recognized as an artist of the “trace,” who creates beauty out of memory and absence.3 One might ultimately character- ize Cross as an “artist of dispossession,” because although the Dublin and Boston exhibitions serve a valuable archival function, Cross herself is more committed to dissemination than to preservation.

In her dedication to an artistic practice that is trans- formative, that “confirms uncertainty,”4 Cross has turned her attention to what is destabilizing in our common psychic experience – of repression, desire, and loss – and to what is disorienting in our encounters with the complexities of nature. Further exploration of these themes will reveal both their constancy and the richness of their variation in Cross’s work.

Dorothy Cross: Virgin shroud, 1993, cow hide, satin train, steel Cross first began to explore the return of the repressed structure; courtesy Kerlin Gallery in relation to gender and sexual identity, most notably in a series that came to be known as her ‘udder’ works. During the 1990s, Cross covered a variety of familiar objects with cowhide, udder and teats intact. Using sexual ambiguity as a deconstructive tool, she cleared a path within each gender stereotype for the return of the repressed other / udder.

24 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 In Virgin shroud (1993), for example, she draped a separating these sites, the artist also discovered a breach tall form in a cowskin, with four teats crowning the deep within each one, where everything designated as figure’s covered ‘head’, and the artist’s grandmother’s silk ‘other’ had made its secret habitation. wedding train extending onto the floor from beneath the hide. The refined wedding gown that seals the fate of the virgin bride is dominated here by the return of an animal body traditionally denied by that white silk purity. The feminine ideal represented by figures such as the Virgin Mary is superseded in Virgin shroud by the horns of the virgin goddess that restore to the figure a more aggressive and powerful aspect. In Amazon (1992), a dressmaker’s mannequin, another emblem of female domesticity, is metamorphosed into a warrior bearing on her chest a huge udder with a single erect teat. What emerges in these works is an image of primitive female fecundity, aggressive sexuality, and power.

It is important to note, however, that Cross used the transformative power of the udder to perform the same liberating, subversive work on stereotypes of masculin- ity: the workman’s boots (Spurs), the gymnastic ‘horse’ (Vaulting horse), the dart board (Bull's eye), Rugby ball, and even Pap, a bottle fitted with a teat –-all these accoutrements of masculinity are returned to a dependence on the nipple. Cross insinuates into each gendered image the potential otherness of the udder –-which becomes phallic on the dressmaker’s dummy, Dorothy Cross: Amazon, 1992, cowhide and tailor’s dummy; maternal on the Guinness bottle. It is not Cross’s collection of Avril Giaccobi; courtesy Kerlin Gallery intention simply to reverse these stereotypes but to dismantle and confuse sexual dualism itself. La primera cena (1992), or The first supper, installed in a twelfth-century convent in Madrid, consisted of a table In her site-specific work, Cross often shifts her attention draped with cowskin, udders uppermost, and twelve from individual psychology to collective memories silvered glass chalices arranged in a circle on the floor buried in public sites. For the Edge Biennial (1992), held below, each with a small hole for sucking its contents. simultaneously in London and Madrid, Cross sought This humorous play on the Last Supper set the stage for out in each city an architectural site where the culture’s the viewer’s encounter with a pre-Christian fantasy of repressed fantasies lay buried. Pairing a nun’s residence maternal sacrifice. In this melancholy crypt something in Madrid and an abandoned men’s public urinal in cherished, but long lost, quietly came to light. London, Cross brought together church and state, private and public, spiritual and corporeal, female and male. As For the London installation, entitled Attendant (1992), she bridged the geographical and ideological distance viewers entered a male preserve where rigid definitions

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 25

Dorothy Cross: Bull’s eye, 1992, dartboard, cow’s teat, 26 darts, 46 x 8.5 cm; courtesy Kerlin Gallery previous two pages: Dorothy Cross: Spurs, 1993, cow teats , string, boots; courtesy Kerlin Gallery

Dorothy Cross: Attendant, 1992, cast bronze, underground toilet, 46 x 25 x 20 cm; courtesy Kerlin Gallery

of masculinity and national identity were exposed. Signs the impossible desire to immerse oneself in the other. at the entrance directed visitors not to “Gentlemen” or The sculpture Passion bed (1991), for example, is a fragile “Ladies” but to “English” or “Irish.” Both choices led to and inaccessibly high woven wire construction within the same lower region where Cross had installed a pair of which glasses that have been sandblasted through with bronze urinals in the shape of England and Ireland, each images of man-eating sharks are precariously arrayed country’s central bowl draining out through a penis- – dysfunctional objects that remind us of the dangers shaped pipe. Contrary to above-ground hostilities, the of desire. These deadly sharks also appear in the site- penises inclined toward each other and aimed at the same specific installation Slippery slope (1990), where steel hole in the floor. In these and related works by Cross, the shark silhouettes were suspended by chains down the ideologies of church and nation are laid bare, revealing at side of a spillway, straining to reach the river below. Here their secret core the very elements they were constructed the sharks figure vulnerability and frustration more than to exclude. danger. Attached to their source in a sewage outlet at the top of the two-hundred-foot gorge, the sharks will never The repressed always returns –-not just in the form of reach their desire, and their bodies are gradually eroded buried histories but in resurgent desires as well. Cross by the contaminants that are endangering the natural often turns to nature for images that evoke the dynamic terrain. energy of the sexual drives, the vulnerability of love, and

28 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 Dorothy Cross: Rugby ball, 1994, mixed media, 30 x 18 cm; courtesy Kerlin Gallery

The impossibility of desire is given its most complex elaboration in a site-specific work entitled Chiasm (1999). This multi-media piece was performed in Galway, in a pair of abandoned open-air handball alleys onto which Cross projected mirror images of a limestone tidal pool, the Worm’s Hole, filmed on the Aran Islands. This image of nature in embrace, water penetrating stone and stone containing water, suggests the potential trans- formative interaction of beings in desire, yet its power is constrained here within the man-made structure of the handball courts.

On this transformed stage, a tenor and a soprano sang fragments from ten tragic romantic operas. The shifting Dorothy Cross: Passion bed, 1993, steel wire, sandblasted wine juxtapositions of the collage text, the random blocking glasses, 254 x 53 x 170 cm; courtesy Kerlin Gallery of the singers’ movements, the open seating that offered viewers different points of view – all of these effects

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 29 Dorothy Cross: Chiasm, 1999, performance in handball alley; courtesy Kerlin Gallery highlighted the role of misunderstanding and accident in his birthday every year until his death. This chiasmic the vicissitudes of love. intertwining of science and passion, of knowledge and its limits, is also central to the related video Medusae When the voices of man and woman come together (2003). Made in collaboration with her zoologist brother, across different plots and languages, love seems to this project documents the scientific illumination of the triumph. Yet the singers remain on opposite sides of the fascinating mechanics of how jellyfish swim, but never dividing wall, blind to each other despite the fact that eradicates the persistent mystery of this almost bodiless they stand within the same projected landscape. Chiasm creature. Desire and the desire for knowledge both dramatizes the limitations of our ability to know and encounter their limits. be known by the other. The natural cycle of the ebb and flow of water in the tidal pool is repeated in the inevita- That sense of limitation invariably brings desire face-to- ble alternations of love and loss. face with absence and loss in Cross’s work. Influenced early on by Beckett’s unflinching view of the death we Cross’s video Come into the garden Maude (2001) also inherit at birth, Cross created a composite image of an brings together nature and the limitations of desire. X-ray of an adult human skull overlaid with an x-ray This work draws on the documented and imagined life of a fetus curled up within the womb-like brain cavity. of Maude Delap, a late-nineteenth-century self-taught Death lurks in our brains and in the most banal activities scientist who succeeded in breeding jellyfish in bell jars of daily life – a shark fin cutting across the surface of a in her father’s house. The story of her experimental and bathtub, a scene of imminent shipwreck projected into a scholarly achievements, against all odds, is interwoven fine china teacup.5 with fragments of the story of her unrequited love for an English zoologist to whom she sent wild violets on In her sited works, Cross turns from the individual’s

30 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 Dorothy Cross: Medusae, 2003, DVD; courtesy Kerlin Gallery intimacy with death to explore the broader cultural means by which we try to evade its inevitability. In the Texas installation CRY (1996), Cross explored different attitudes toward death: a large freezer filled with frozen snakes alludes to a belief in the science and technology of CRYonics, and a nineteenth-century Irish apocalyp- tic painting, Francis Danby’s The Opening of the Sixth Seal, printed onto sheer fabric and kept in motion by a pair of oscillating fans, depicts an immersion in narratives of salvation and damnation. All scientific and religious efforts to preserve life against mortality collapse, ultimately, into the six-foot vertical tomb dug by the artist into the gallery floor, concretizing what she describes as the “rot and reality” of death. Dorothy Cross: Teacup, 1997, DVD; courtesy Kerlin Gallery

In what is probably Cross’s best known work, Ghost ship (1999), the beauty of loss is stunningly realized. This project involved coating with phosphorescent paint a decommissioned lightship discovered by the artist in a Dublin dockyard. The ship was set afloat in Dublin Bay where every evening for three weeks it was alternately illuminated and left to glow and fade.

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 31 Cross’s goal was not to recreate the ship’s outmoded These images are projected in negative, a fantasy world of function, but rather to illuminate its disappearance. black ice illuminated from below and haunted by spectral Ghost ship offered viewers the gift of time slowed down divers in white. for the contemplation of loss –-an ongoing process with its own poignant beauty. In the context of the religious austerity of CRY, the tropical paradise of Jellyfish lake, or Antarctica’s world of In her study of melancholia and art, Julia Kristeva icy darkness, passion demands the same self-annihila- proposes that “beauty emerges as the admirable face tion of the desiring subject. But that sacrifice is repaid, in of loss, transforming it in order to make it live.”6 This Cross’s work, by the promise of a temporary immersion seems a fitting description of much of Cross’s work, in the fragile and awesome beauty of nature. including her staging of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater in a cave on Valentia Island (August 2004) – an unforgettable In her explorations of repression, desire, death, and spectacle in which mourning was transformed through nature, Cross’s aesthetic practice of transformation and

Dorothy Cross: Ghost ship, 1999, decommissioned lightship, paint, Dún Laoghaire harbour; courtesy Kerlin Gallery

art so that passion might be retrieved and shared. transmission remains enigmatic. Somehow her art makes the return of the repressed productive rather than merely Cross’s video Jellyfish lake (2003) creates a very different repetitious, keeps faith with desire even in the face of representation of shared passion: a naked woman floats desire’s impossibility, and renders the wounds of loss in turquoise waters of Palau with hundreds of jellyfish, bearable and communicable to others. No matter how her undulating hair in harmony with their pulsating conceptual her work becomes, Dorothy Cross never loses bodies in an erotic underwater ballet. And most recently, sight of the materiality of history, the complexities of in Antarctica (2005), a video premiered at the artist’s nature, and the ‘bursting into beauty’ that can occur in Frith Street exhibition, several anonymous figures the most unexpected places. submerged in Antarctic waters dive amongst the icebergs.

32 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 of Chicago Press, 2005). Other catalogues with important critical essays on Cross’s work include: Dorothy Cross: Ebb, edited by Patrick T. Murphy and Tom Weir (Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery, 1988); Dorothy Cross: Power House, edited by Melissa Feldman (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Philadelphia, 1991); and even; recent work by Dorothy Cross, edited by Tessa Jackson and Josephine Lanyon (Bristol: Arnolfini, 1996). 2 See Simon Morley, Irish art international, Art Monthly No. 196 (May 1996), pp. 13 – 16. Morley borrows Dorothy Cross: Untitled, 1995, black-and-white photograph, 81 x 61 cm; courtesy Kerlin Gallery this concept from Rosalind Krauss’s The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Robin Lydenberg is Professor of English at Boston Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). College; she is the author of GONE: Site-specific Works 3 See TRACE: 1st Liverpool Biennial of International by Dorothy Cross (Boston: McMullen Museum and Contemporary Art, curated by Anthony Bond (Liverpool: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Liverpool Biennial of International Contemporary Art and Tate Gallery, Liverpool, 1999). 4 Cross quoted in Libby Anson, Cross talk, Art Monthly, No. 203 1 The Dublin and Boston exhibitions have each produced a (February 1997), pp. 20 – 21 substantial catalogue, richly illustrated and with extended 5 critical commentary: Dorothy Cross (Milan: Irish Museum of The x-ray composite (Untitled) was part of a solo exhibition Modern Art and Charta, 2005), including essays by Enrique entitled Inheritance (1995); the shark in the tub is Bath (1988), Juncosa, Patrick Murphy, Ralph Rugoff, and Marina Warner; and the video work is Teacup (1999). and GONE: Site-specific Works by Dorothy Cross, by Robin 6 See Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy Lydenberg (Boston: McMullen Museum of Art and University (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 33 MINING A QUARRY: STABAT MATER BY DOROTHY CROSS

Stabat Mater, directed by Dorothy Cross, was a live performance of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s seventeenth- century acclaimed arrangement of the Stabat Mater Dolorosa in a remote slate quarry and Marian grotto on the western edge of Valentia Island, in the southern tip of Ireland. The project, which took place in August 2004, was a collaboration with Dublin-based Opera Theatre Company. Stabat Mater was performed by two opera singers, a countertenor (Jonathan Kenny) and soprano (Lynda Lee), and a baroque chamber orchestra, costumed in dirty overalls and safety helmets. The performance took place at night at the mouth of the quarry cave on a site that doubled as the altar of the grotto. A large-scale video projection with sound appeared in the space on comple- tion of the recital. The video was projected onto a screen that advanced mechanically from within the dramati- cally lit quarry cave towards the standing audience. The presence of a video work with a sound track of industrial noise in such a setting certainly challenged the audience to adjust their reception from stirring baroque music to the language of contemporary art. In this outdoor context the fifteen-minute video finale was unsettling and self- conscious, yet its disruptiveness made Cross’ Stabat Mater a compelling and memorable site-specific work.

There was a distinct secular, profane and even mundane Dorothy Cross: Stabat Mater, performance / installation shots; courtesy Kerlin Gallery quality to this recital of Stabat Mater; the singers alter- nately mounted the grotto’s altar in their work boots, and the audience looked on in waterproof or heavy clothing. Such a functional factory aesthetic is prevalent through- out Cross’ varied work, and my first impression of this performance was of a historical afterimage of a trajec- tory of the avant garde in the last century.1 As I watched the performance I had a fantasy about a quarry workers’ collective that loved opera performing a beautiful, affecting, sonorous piece of music to local residents of the island and beyond.2 In keeping with the credo of bringing art into life, this was a utopian image of a Soviet-style revolutionary experiment, where the production of art aligned itself to a shared political (evangelical) task and

34 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 where the “art of the proletariat was not a holy shrine where things are lazily regarded, but work, a factory which produces new artistic things.”3

The history of industrialization in Ireland is uneven and even marginal, as the country remained largely agricul- tural until the 1960s, so the slate quarry at Valentia is something of a unique industrial space that converted into Marian grotto in a postindustrial transformation. The quarry opened in 1816 and at its height of production in 1858, the year of the apparition at Lourdes in France, it employed over 400 people. The slate was used on the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, Westminster Abbey, and the shelves of the Public Record Office in London. When it closed in the 1960s, the grotto was constructed; however, mining recommenced in 1998 and continues today on a small scale. The supplanting of functions has in a sense see-sawed, as religious devotion in contempo- rary Ireland has decreased dramatically in the wake of increased wealth and appalling revelations of institutional abuse of children by Church and State authorities in so- called Industrial Schools.

Cross’ attention with the video imagery (which dramati- cally took centre stage after the live performance) was specifically focused on factory production at the Dorothy Cross: Stabat Mater, performance / installation shots; quarry. Close-up shots of engineering technology courtesy Kerlin Gallery cutting and polishing slate were transformed in scale into the spectacle of utilitarian power, the power of the male machinists over nature demonstrated by a destruc- almost like an industrial apparition of ghost-like point-of- tive torrent from a saw blade slicing stone effortlessly. view shots recalling the indelible presence of the quarry by The repeated cutting in the context of the passion of the working day. Virgin Mary in Stabat Mater almost invited a comparison between the mining that has taken place in the quarry Things begin in caves, the stone rolls away, stories emerge, and an industrial tragedy. If our empathy was directed in witches gather, precious seams are discovered, accidents the recital to feeling the pain of Mary, here in the video happen, visions occur. This sense of the video articulat- an air of melancholy shrouded the physical transforma- ing an altered, lens-based reality after the ‘Amen’ of Stabat tion of nature by machines. The video projected at night Mater, was clearly visible in the speeded-up, time-lapse, corrected our vision of the quarry as a place (with a otherworld quality of the images of windblown heather sepulchral acoustic) for concert performances, appearing and grasses, racing clouds, dripping or weeping moss,

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 35 or the traces of nature gathered around the mouth of this performance and creating the video work. Those the quarry accompanied by the acceleration and roar of members of the community who fifty years ago chose this machines. At its most basic level, the narrative content site eighty feet above the ground for a grotto were clearly of the video presented in long shot the two lead worker- looking for visual impact and a sense of the sublime from singers silhouetted against the light of the aperture of the then disused quarry.5 While the particularities of the the cave and followed their journey deep into its rear, devotion to the Virgin Mary (and her appearances) are to a tranquil pool. Both actors casually sat by the pool important in Ireland, this quarry was already symbolic in filled with submerged relics of earlier industry (fossils of a general sense of the cult of the Virgin Mary, her tears progress) and gazed and sang faint notes that bled into the of sorrow and love from the waterfall / spring (the death industrial noise returning to the light outside. Was this a of her offspring as the birth of baptism), her assumption typical break from labour for the worker singers? On their at the extreme height. Again at a general level in a wider return the camera’s attention rested briefly on a slogan European context, Mary’s appearances have been predom- painted on the container / site office of the quarry: ‘quality inately associated with springs, caves, hills and stones.6 is our future’. However, there would seem to be an ambivalence about This phrase was particularly apt for a quarry that has its the siting of the grotto in this disused quarry. Firstly, it best days behind it. Niche orders are today’s market, where was never, despite its ‘physical’ suitability, the location of the local becomes a luxury that no longer competes with an apparition or vision of either Mary or St Bernadette; imports from low-wage economies (where the neolib- and secondly, on an island with a long history of intense eral motto of the quarries might be ‘work makes you tourist activity, religious tourists were a very distinct free’). But the phrase also drew attention in a reflexive market, as the signposts for the grotto on the island and way to the new uses of sites of industry as a backdrop postcards of the grotto testify. The superficial similarity to culture. Cross has already worked with a decommis- between the quarry and spring and the prototyptic spring sioned lightship and an abandoned power station. The at Lourdes implied a translation of Lourdes for a home nineteenth-century Paris Opera House (a venue for the audience. The words ‘artificial grotto’ are in essence a ‘quality’) may have a pit and thick Valentia blue slates on tautology. its roof, but there the association with the quarry would have ended, until now. As the music of Stabat Mater got under your skin in the dramatic atmosphere of this telluric quarry (the rain also But both worker-singers sidestepped past this statement in poured down on the night I attended), there was, however, a deliberate fashion and the final images of the video were to be no access (due to insurance restrictions) to shelter shot in slow motion from a moving vehicle; they conveyed inside this “sacrificial shaft dug into Mother Earth.”7 dark and bleak images of bars and numbered slabs of The triangular or pyramidal shape of the mouth of the stone reminiscent of a war-time cemetery, or of a labour cave was accentuated through the locating of a tableau camp. The video was book-ended by images of the Marian of Mary appearing to St Bernadette at the waterfall apex grotto almost as if to represent other histories, the history of the triangle. The interior seemed dead from industry, of the role of the Virgin Mary in patriarchal culture and the exterior dead from the lapse in devotions. Within the collective unconscious, or the history of the tension the physical subterranean volume, a prehistoric memory between church control and the forces of industrialization. seemed to be sculpted from its nineteenth-century origins, In this sense I would specifically link Stabat Mater with a negative space of absence, though not unlike the negative other, older works by Cross dealing with sex and death space of a single breast, for example, like the negative like Virgin shroud (1991) or Screen: ladies changing room space of Cross’ iconic phallic breast in Amazon (1990). (1991), or Parthenon (1991), works where the inference of a conjugal union between society and technology, to This association of the quarry with a breast / phallus in borrow Walter Benjamin’s observation, “betrayed man and Stabat Mater was clearly intended by the still video image turned the bridal bed into a bloodbath.”4 of an open women’s mouth suspended and isolated in the mouth of the cave. This image also appeared on the The Marian grotto context was obviously an inspiration invitation card. Indeed within the cult of the Virgin Mary, for the locating of Stabat Mater at the mouth of the quarry her single breast is all that we see of her shrouded virginal but again, as mentioned above, I do not believe that body; as Julia Kristeva outlines, “milk and tears become Cross was attempting to create a sacred work in directing the privileged signs of Mater Dolorosa.”8 For Kristeva

36 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 and for many vision seers, the compassionate tears of themes and images from such work as it endeavoured to the Mater Dolorosa become a kind of nonspeech, her incorporate varying facets of contemporary site-specific emotional state becoming the ‘content’ of the apparition. work in a carefully arranged, unique outdoor night-time event. With the history of this previous work informing Bernadette, kneeling with her back to the river, the direction of the present piece, Stabat Mater showed heard a tumult of voices that seemed to come out of deliberate purpose, skill and clarity. It was not so much the earth and break out on the waters of the Gave; exploring a field as mining a quarry. they called one another, intersected, and clashed noisily as if a multitude in struggle. One voice, Brian Hand is an artist living in the Blackstairs imposing itself on the others, called out stridently Mountains, Co Carlow; he is currently Course Director of and angrily, ‘Go Away! the Gorey School of Art, Go Away!” To this Wexford. shout, which seemed to 1For example Cross’ work be a threat, the Lady Powerhouse (1991) and raised her head and Ghost ship (1999), and the functional architecture of wrinkled her brow, the handball alleys in Chiasm looking toward the (1999). river. With this simple 2Coincidentally when visiting gesture, the voices the quarry on another panicked and fled in all occasion I spoke with the slate 9 cutters working the machines directions. and learned that they were migrant workers from Such a recourse to Ukraine. nonspeech is not 3Nikolai Punin (1918), cited Dorothy Cross: Stabat Mater, performance / installation shots; entirely surprising, since courtesy Kerlin Gallery in Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863- the function of the 1922, New York: Thames and intense grief of Mary Hudson, 1986 in Stabat Mater is quite paradoxical as she (the ‘Mother 4Walter Benjamin, One way street (1926), in One Way Street and of God’) weeps over a corpse she believes will be resur- Other Writings, trans Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, rected by the Almighty Father. The desire for the “glories London: Verso, 1997, p. 104. 5 of paradise” in the medieval poetic text of Stabat Mater The quarry is located close to extraordinary scenic views of the Co. Kerry coastline and Atlantic ocean; maybe in areas of (articulated through the deathly forlorn composition of dramatic seascapes the grottoes should be bigger and more Pergolese) is expressed through the desire for sharing dramatic than the common incarnations. Mary’s grief and love for her only son prostrate at the 6For a systematic account of visions see William A, Christian foot of the cross. Mary’s masochistic desire to feel with Jnr., Visionaries, The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ, her own body the death of a masculine body (a body she University of California Press, USA, 1996, p.457 note 2. gave birth to, nurtured, and the only male body she ever 7Walter Benjamin, op cit. p. 104. knew) commanded by the will of a remote Father, leads 8Julia Kristeva, Stabat Mater, trans Leon S. Roudiez, in Toril Moi, deep into the symbolic economy of women’s desire and The Kristeva Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, p. 173 9 male authority in Western Christian culture. The function William A. Christian Jr., op cit., p 441, note 88 10 of the virginal maternal is complex, as is the modern Cross used a telephoto lens to zoom in on the grotto figures of Mary and Bernadette and revealed the rusting text around the abnegation of her human qualities in the doctrine of the halo of Mary, “I am the Immaculate conception.” Immaculate Conception formalized as dogma in 1854 at 11 10 Stabat Mater was the second work of Cross’ to be sited on the peak of mining activity in Valentia. Valentia, as she had earlier completed Medusae (2003), a video collaboration with her brother Tom, centred around the life of Cross has been very attentive in previous works such as a famous island resident scientist, the late Maude Delap. See a review by Sheila Dickinson, CIRCA 104, Summer 2003, pp. 82 Chiasm (1999), Ghost ship (1999) and Parthenon (1991), – 83. to the social, mythic and symbolic function of the spaces she chooses to work with, and combined those aspects with concepts from psychoanalysis, history and personal experience.11 Stabat Mater continued and developed

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 37 THE MULTITUDE: REPUBLIC OF IRELAND AND NORTHERN IRELAND AT THE 2005 VENICE BIENNALE

As Venice once again beckons, there’s a new kid on the canal: Northern Ireland. Declan Long looks here at what both parts of Ireland will be offering at this year’s Biennale.

As the publicity blurb for the forthcoming Venice convulsed world.”2 The condition of contemporary life, Biennale announces, the fifty-first International Art Martínez argues, is one of paradox – “we still believe in Exhibition will explore the state of contemporary art the need for reason, enlightenment and utopia,” she writes, “from two points of view.” Two curators will oversee two “even if we have become their most ferocious critics” – separate sections, one in the Giardini, the other in the and, as a consequence, there are always at least two forces Arsenale, and each space will feature work by significant simultaneously shaping her thoughts: “passion and melan- figures from both the past and the present. Both curators, choly, trust and desperation, pleasure and guilt combine to Maria de Corral and Rosa Martínez, are Spanish, and for define the critical approach to the world in which we live.” both it is the second time round at Venice, since each has taken her turn at curating the Biennale’s Spanish Pavilion. Such evidence of what Fredric Jameson has termed “stere- De Corral’s contribution on this occasion will be The oscopic thinking”3 is, of course, particularly appropriate Experience of Art, an exhibition which she describes as given the ‘double vision’ that has been facilitated by the “a field open to distinct practices,” her primary objective appointment of two curators. And given this tendency being to make possible a process “defined in terms of towards multiplicity of perspectives, it is fitting that for the the relationships between different subjects, forms, ideas first time ever not only will there be the now customary and spaces.”1 However vague such an agenda may seem, Republic of Ireland Pavilion, but there will also be an this interest in revealing relationships of various kinds, exhibition of current art from Northern Ireland. The state in making connections between multiple practices and of contemporary art on this island, then, is also to be seen ideas, is at least complementary to the stress on combi- from two points of view. Moreover, the strategies adopted nation and contradiction that is set to characterize the by the commissioners from Ireland, North and South contribution of Rosa Martínez. Martínez’s Always a Little – Hugh Mulholland and Sarah Glennie, respectively – are Further will bring together a range of work sensitive to the in each case informed by a desire to open up ‘national’ dualities of modernity, offering dramatic encounters with representation to multiple perspectives. Most fundamen- what she has termed “the zones of light and dark in our tally, this is clear in terms of the actual number of artists

38 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 involved: from the Republic, Sarah Glennie has made six Perhaps the overriding agenda for Sarah Glennie, however, selections, choosing artists currently working in Ireland, has been to acknowledge multiplicity by providing what not all of whom are Irish; not to be outdone, Hugh she terms a ‘snapshot’ of contemporary art in Ireland at Mulholland has made fourteen selections from Northern this point in time, presenting a view of quickly changing Ireland, promoting practitioners who, as Mulholland’s circumstances rather than aiming to construct a compre- statement indicates, “are part of a wider conversation, one hensive survey or an authoritative argument. The snapshot that is both local and international.”4 However, extending is a telling metaphor in this regard, for though it might in such conversations, opening up multiple possibilities of one obvious sense be suggestive of a static scene, an image participation and engagement at different times and in frozen in time, it may also be understood in a manner different contexts, has also been an obvious consideration, more appropriate to this Venice representation. Jean Fisher each curator having made efforts to ensure that diverse has written that in a ‘snapshot’ “objects may be unfocused, audiences are addressed: quite independently, both Glennie and Mulholland have planned two-part programmes which, unthinkably, take into account a world beyond the vernissage. In the case of the Northern repre- sentation there will first of all be an exhibition entitled The Nature of Things running through- out the Biennale period and featuring eight of the selected artists; later, in mid-October, the remaining artists will present A Long Weekend of live events and inter- Ronan McCrea: Sequences, scenarios and locations (after Hänsel and Gretel) version 2, 2004, slide ventions over several installation, photo / courtesy: the artist days, during which time Northern Ireland will also hold its official celebrations – for which the musician cut and sliding out of the picture; the appearance is of a and DJ David Holmes has been drafted in as an additional fragment from a larger view, an indicator of the passage of recruit (following his work on Ocean’s 12, Holmes now time”; and, moreover, cinematic narrative is generated out finds himself providing the soundtrack for Mulholland’s of successive ‘snapshots’, each distinct frame demanding 14). As for the Republic, the artists will not only show the next “in order to bring what is outside the visual field work at the Scuola di San Pasquale in Venice but will also into view, and to complete a movement that constantly regroup later in the year for an exhibition at the stunning remains unresolved.”5 Such comments seem to me not new Glucksman Gallery in Cork. At this stage Glennie only relevant to Glennie’s curatorial agenda, but the refer- will hand over the curatorial reins in order to ensure that ences to multiple fragments, unresolved narratives and the further perspectives can be offered. For related reasons, passage of time also relate to tendencies in the work of the Glennie has also invited the Sculptors’ Society of Ireland artists set to ‘represent’ Ireland. to produce a special edition of the journal Printed Project as a supplement to the Venice selections; this publication, Most particularly, perhaps, we might think of Ronan to be edited by the artist Alan Phelan, will bring together McCrea here, whose practice involves a meditation on a range of commentaries on the Biennale experience (and “fragments from a larger view.” The current focus of related subjects), adding still more points of view to an McCrea’s energies is an ongoing series, Scenarios, sequences already impressively ‘multiple’ representation. and locations, a body of work employing multiple visual

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 39 fragments to suggest multi-layered and open-ended ated with the latter certainly have a bearing on Nightfall, narrative possibilities. This developing work takes the the film by brothers Joe and Pat Walker which will share form of a multi-projector slide show in which sequences with McCrea’s installation the upper floor of the Scuola. of photographic images are used to construct story-lines Nightfall (first shown at the RHA in 2004) is the Walkers’ involving a young girl who, in an echo of the fairy tale first foray into film-making following a noted series Hänsel and Gretel, drops small pieces of paper as she of sculptural works concerned with the sublime as the journeys through various city spaces. Given firstly that the ‘unpresentable’, their ongoing point of reference being the girl is the artist’s daughter and secondly that in two of the Romantic visions of Caspar David Friedrich. In Nightfall sequences (set in Dublin and Venice) the paper cuttings such fascinations are again apparent, though by employing are from drawings or photographs of the artist’s late father a properly cinematic visual rhetoric, the Walkers have achieved their most profound evocation of sublime limitlessness to date. The film has the appropriately awesome natural setting of Lake Königsee in Bavaria and, as in McCrea’s work, the narrative centres on a lone protagonist’s movement through landscape – though here it is not an accumulating collection of fragments which maintains narrative momentum but instead repetitions, echoes and contrasts. Most significant, in this respect, is the repetition of the central figure himself Joe and Pat Walker: Nightfall, 2004, film still, 16mm film; courtesy the artists who, as day becomes night, finds himself pursued, or echoed, by a doppelgänger. in a post-mortem state, McCrea’s work can be under- ‘Doubles’, of course, make perfect sense in the context stood, in part, as a deeply personal attempt to come to of this Biennale and the structural importance of the terms with the inevitable ‘inadequacies’ of representation movement from day to night in Nightfall seems to echo and memory. The use of slide projectors is in this sense Rosa Martínez’s interest in “the zones of light and dark in interesting, referring to conventions of official archiving our convulsed world.” Perhaps if there is a ‘convulsion’ in in order to establish an anxious relation to the authority the world of the Walkers’ film it is close to the ‘convulsive of ‘public’ histories. Recently McCrea has taken a new set beauty’ understood by André Breton as a crucial cognate of slides in Berlin, where his daughter has left as a trail a of the ‘marvellous’; for although Romanticism is the series of found images from a German family album; the Walkers’ preferred subject, I am drawn to the ‘uncanny’ dispersal of fragments from such a distant family history characteristics of their film that might also be associated should, in the context of the expanded Venice installation, with surrealism. Surrealist notions such as ‘convulsive make for a compelling contrast to the narratives based on beauty’ and the ‘marvellous’ are, as Hal Foster has written, McCrea’s personal archive. “anxious crossings of contrary states…hysterical confus- ings of different identities”7 and such ideas might be The urban re-enactment of the Hansel and Gretel story relevant not only to the depiction of space and character in these works recalls Walter Benjamin’s often–cited in Nightfall, but also to the “contrary states” to be encoun- reference to losing oneself in a city “as one loses oneself in tered in the work of Stephen Brandes. a forest,”6 and the uncertainties and primal fears associ-

40 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 As with other artists selected by Glennie, Brandes has we might also relate this definition to the ‘marvellous’ pursued curatorial projects in addition to practicing as an intimacies of Isabel Nolan’s practice. All that is most artist. A notable venture in this regard was the acclaimed recognizable and familiar tends to be the foundation of group exhibition Superbia, set in a suburban house Nolan’s work, though it is the ultimate inscrutability of in Dublin, in which various artworks played with, or known things that we, and the artist, would seem to be left against, the familiar forms of domestic space. Superbia’s with. In her various paintings, drawings, texts and videos, direct engagement with the notion of ‘home’ involved Nolan’s closest companions and her immediate, everyday an unheimlich defamiliarising of suburban harmony world become the subjects of an ‘uncertain’ process of – identifying the uncanny as something both horrifying representation which, in the cautious and discreet peculi- and homely. This relates to Brandes’s broader practice arity of the resulting images, prompts reflection on the insofar as his works have often presented multiple ways manner in which we make sense of our own surrounding of understanding, or reaching, or even leaving, home. ‘reality’. At times, such representation is combined with Ways of Escape, his 2004 exhibition at Temple Bar Gallery, obviously puzzling abstract forms, and this establishing Dublin, was important in this regard, presenting a wealth of relationships between disparate elements (as with the of paintings and drawings which frequently alluded to combinations and variations of media) creates a level of homes or homelands, real and imagined. As with much

Stephen Brandes: Vital organ, 2003, ink on paper; courtesy the Isabel Nolan: No one else (after F. Kunath), pencil and watercol- artsist and Rubicon Gallery, Dublin our on paper, 14.5 x 21 cm; courtesy the artist

of Brandes’s recent practice, these works were inspired resistance to interpretation or explanation. In her recent by drawings the artist made while following the route exhibition at Project, Everything I Said Let Me Explain, taken by his grandmother early in the twentieth century this troubled relation to meaning and meaninglessness as she fled from her native Romania – a journey of great was most apparent in an animated film that anxiously hardship which literally involved “anxious crossings of contemplated ‘contrary states’ of reality. This animation, contrary states.” In Brandes’s work, however, this history of which will be shown in Venice along with a number an escape from home is not sentimentalised but becomes of works on paper, imagines a close friend of the artist a point of narrative and imaginative departure, subject to being confronted by a strange ‘presence’ while in a state the vagaries of memory and to endless transformation and somewhere between sleep and waking. It is a remarkable reinvention. evocation of an impenetrable private world, the enigmatic scenes bringing to mind a description by the critic James For the surrealist writer Louis Aragon the ‘marvellous’ Wood of the “true privacies”9 of characters in Chekhov’s was “an eruption of contradiction into the real”8 and not stories: “watching a Chekhov character,” Wood suggests, “is only is there something of this in Brandes’s combination like watching a lover wake up in bed, half-awake and half- of the fantastical and the familiar (his large-scale works, dreaming, saying something odd and private which means two of which will be shown in Venice, map extraordi- nothing to us because it refers to the preceding dream.”10 nary territories onto mundane discarded linoleum) but

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 41 Wood’s admiration for Chekhov is, in part, based on into the installations are other craft materials such as what he calls this writer’s “intimate fantastic”11 fictional pins and beading, the utilitarian function of which is as world – a phrase which hints at the likely atmosphere important as their decorative effect. An additional feature of the space in Venice which will feature Isabel Nolan, is the positioning of other, somewhat more curious, Stephen Brandes and Mark Garry. In each of these artists’ objects at odd co-ordinates: these have included leaves, practices, personal stories, intimate moments or subjec- origami birds and even potted plants, elements which tive experiences often become radically estranged or directly signal links to the natural world – specific refer- connected to the unknown and the out-of-the-ordinary. ences to nature, therefore, are placed in the context of a A connection between these varieties of intimacy is also, fragile system of relations. then, ‘connectedness’ itself: these artists share a (diversely applied) commitment to constructing multiple associative Garry’s works of this kind have been by turns elaborate networks and to making unlikely conceptual, emotional or and gracefully restrained. But in general this is, of course, spatial links. This is, of course, most literally the case with an understated aesthetic and the subtle effects of the Garry, whose delicate site-specific installations connect spectrums of thread are dependant primarily on the points in space through the use of meticulously assembled relation of perception to position: from one point of view, arrangements of multi-coloured thread. Also incorporated the angular lines are barely visible; from another, they offer a fleeting, psychedelic dazzle. In his new work for Venice, this possibility of heightened sensation is increased through the introduction of an aural component – simple tunes played on antique music boxes – which should add to the sense of spatial intervention as well as further multiplying the connective conceptual possibilities.

Garry’s, ‘associative networks’ begin, then, from formal strategies and metonymic suggestion. For The Metropolitan Complex, however, it is social and personal networks that are vital. Sarah Pierce, the artist and curator who initiates the diverse Metropolitan Complex projects, has, since arriving in Dublin from the U.S. some years ago, devoted considerable energy to involving both individu- als and institutions in an ongoing, flexible process of exchange and critique, establishing open systems that might facilitate new forms of practice, organization or thought (emphasising a kind of Deleuzian ‘diversity of becoming’, perhaps). For Venice, Pierce has chosen to place herself at a slight angle to the official selection by, first of all, collaborating with some unlikely ambassadors for cultural production in Ireland, and also by securing a space for The Metropolitan Complex which is neither fully inside nor entirely outside the National Pavilion. This space is the formerly off-limits garden of the Scuola, a site which is noteworthy in that Venice has few green spaces and, as a result, Pierce will be able to establish a ‘time- out’ environment from the frenetic pace of the Biennale. Crucial to this temporary oasis, however, will be an Mark Garry: Element 1 and 2: one thought, 2004, plant, thread, beads, vinyl and pins, dimensions variable, installation shot, engagement with the ‘Forgotten Zine Library’, an archive Kerlin Gallery; courtesy the artist of punk fanzines from the 1990s (‘archives’ have been a regular feature of Pierce’s practice), a collection that has become the fulcrum of the current Metropolitan Complex project. This subcultural library has been compiled over several years by various Dublin-based punk aficionados,

42 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 its home shifting from place to place, ‘curatorial’ respon- paintings superficially recall the language of post-painterly sibilities transferring from person to person. Now, Pierce abstraction, but they are in a sense its opposite, maintain- has chosen four hundred examples of these underground ing a connection with looking out into the lived world, documents of dissent to become improbable ‘national’ offering views, feelings, based on a particular understand- representatives at the art world’s major global event. ing of nature. Since his 2002 exhibition at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, McKeown has often shown such works Pierce’s project, then, involves yet more of the multiple inside specially constructed spaces: austere structures perspectives, ‘fragments’ and proliferating connectivities within which the paintings become essential windows that appear to characterize Ireland’s presence at the 2005 onto “the otherness of elsewhere.”12 The belief, promoted Biennale, and, as has been indicated, her work compli- by these paintings, in nature as feeling, and the argument cates the way in which an official selection of artists made for an empathetic, inclusive notion of beauty, bring to mind lines from Raymond Carver’s The phenomenon: “when I look out / the window again, there’s a sudden swoop of feeling. / Once more I’m arrested with the beauty of this place. / I was lying if I ever said anything to the contrary.”13

William McKeown: Hope drawing – the morning #18, watercolour Darren Murray: Japanese temple garden, 2001, oil on canvas, on paper, 57 x 50 cm; courtesy Tonic Design 152cm x 214 cm; courtesy Tonic Design

will be read as national representation. For the artists McKeown’s unapologetic painterly advocation of a from Northern Ireland, this issue is arguably even more revitalized notion of beauty is a position held in opposi- important, given international assumptions and stere- tion to those contemporary processes through which otypes regarding attitudes to national identity in Northern the categories of ‘beauty’ and ‘nature’ are corrupted or Ireland – though, it should be noted that the Northern commodified. In the paintings of Darren Murray, those Ireland representation is not a ‘national’ Pavilion as such, processes are more evidently the subject of ongoing inter- but rather, like the Scottish and Welsh selections, it is rogation: whereas McKeown uses open skies to signal an billed as a ‘collateral event’. Even so, Hugh Mulholland’s ever-possible, fully-realisable freedom, Murray concerns laudable desire to launch an expansive and ambitiously himself with the construction of freedom as ‘leisure’ – as inclusive programme is important, his selection highlight- an always compromised opportunity to ‘get away from ing practices that are at once sensitive to the specificities it all’. Murray’s vibrantly coloured landscapes, therefore, of local conditions and histories, while also being undeni- play on multiple representations of desired destinations: ably outward-looking. an evocation of a Hawaiian resort, perhaps, or Japanese gardens, or even the ‘wilderness parks’ of the United Of all the artists included in The Nature of Things, States. This is, however, more than pastiche; there is a William McKeown is perhaps most overtly concerned restless relation to art history here, an ‘anxious crossing’ with the possibilities of looking outwards. McKeown’s between contrary forms, a merging of abstraction and

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 43 this process is his use of the normally threatening letters UVF, which he burns onto stark white surfaces, construct- ing interconnecting patterns which are often intricate to the point of abstraction. These patterns therefore combine local signifying practices with allusions to late-modernist avant-gardism – and as such Charlesworth’s work has an uneasy relation not only to those troubling vernacular expressions of social allegiance, but also to ‘elite’ aesthetic practices historically associated with the separation of the artist from society.

Charlesworth’s ‘burn marks’ are, then, evidence of a practice at once embedded in the visual and spatial Ian Charlesworth: Some of my friends are…, 2002, carbon and resin on perspex; courtesy Tonic Design culture of Belfast and alert to broader historical condi- tions of artistic production. In The Nature of Things

Mary McIntyre: Vantage point 2, 2005, inkjet print, 89 x 74cm; Seamus Harahan: Holylands, 2003, video still; courtesy Tonic courtesy Tonic Design Design

representation, east and west, Hokusai and Barnett Belfast will be a focus for a number of artists, though Newman. The Newman reference is perhaps worth also in the context of broader ‘conversations’. In the case stressing as a tension exists in Murray’s paintings between of Mary McIntyre’s recent photographs, Belfast is only expressive individuality and designed, reproducible an implied presence, the places pictured being marginal surfaces. And however indirectly, this is also relevant to territories, areas where urban meets rural – the roadway the work of Ian Charlesworth, whose practice pairs a very turning towards countryside in Threshold, for instance, particular form of reproduced content with an interest or a remote Nightbuilding protected by a barbed-wire in the notion of the artist as existential creator. Murray’s fence. These nocturnal scenes are lit only by whatever ultra-vivid scenes are, it should be said, about as far from illumination is available through human involvement in Charlesworth’s ‘imagery’ as one could imagine: while the landscape (a streetlight at the edge of suburbia, for one displays dream holidays, the other, repeatedly, dwells instance), but the effect is nevertheless spectral – ‘empty’ on pub toilet graffiti. Charlesworth’s practice involves space becoming evocative of some otherworldly danger. In reproducing the process of using cigarette lighters to The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler writes of how burn marks or names onto the ceilings of such spaces: in the “forgotten margins” of lived space hide “all the objects Belfast, he has observed, lone individuals privately express of fear and phobia that have returned with such insistency political, and so also social, affiliations, while spending to haunt the imaginations of those who have tried to stake time in a cubicle. Charlesworth’s key choice in replicating out spaces to protect their health and happiness.”14 This

44 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 Katrina Moorehead: The sort of smack that leaves a bruise, 2005, pencil and watercolour on paper, 56 x 76 cm; courtesy Tonic Design

sense of “space as threat, as harbinger of the unseen” is given that that the daily goings-on in this neighbour- relevant to (if not delimited by) the specific spaces staked hood are the subject of relentless recording by an unseen out in these photographs – if there is an implication of presence. As gallery viewers are granted access to this the precariousness of the social order, this has an obvious clandestine observation, there is the suggestion that such a resonance in contemporary Belfast. point of view cannot be a neutral one and, more particu- larly, that in Belfast, ‘surveillance’ becomes internalized. The representation of Belfast in Seamus Harahan’s film Holylands also involves ‘all that is seen and unseen’, though It is worth noting that Harahan’s film also makes use of an in this case, from the window of the artist’s home in the eclectic soundtrack to further open these quotidian scenes ‘Holylands’ district. Filmed over eighteen months, it is a to multiple readings. One such accompanying track (if collection of everyday fragments, comprising the ultra- memory serves) is Bruce Springsteen’s Atlantic City, which mundane, the absurd and the potentially threatening. recontextualises the imagery beyond the ‘local row’ of Harahan’s film, however (as with McIntyre’s photographs), Belfast’s politics – if this is ‘Holy Land’, in other words, it not only examines social space but also foregrounds the is also a globalised ‘Atlantic City’. This reference, however viewing of such spaces, responses to these urban dramas random, suggests a point of comparison with Katrina being dependent on conventions and contexts of specta- Moorehead’s practice since, remarkably, home for her is torship. As such, references to surveillance are irresistible, both the United States and Northern Ireland. Moorehead’s

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 45 Michael Hogg: Motion, 2004, installation shot; courtesy Tonic Design division of time between bases in Texas and Co. Antrim was that of equal employment for Catholic and Protestant exemplifies the “local and international conversations” workers, and so despite the decadence associated with a praised by Hugh Mulholland, and in her current work the bizarre 1980s sports car, Moorehead’s strange historical influence of ongoing transatlantic negotiation is strongly fragments might prompt some degree of ‘nostalgia for evident: her subject being the infamous ‘gull-wing’ doors the future’ – a singularly appropriate idea given that the of the US designed, Belfast-made, DeLorean sports car. ‘DeLorean’ is most famous for its role as a time machine Using model-making materials, the artist recreates these in Back to the Future. distinctive doors, constructing a ‘retro-type’ version of this iconic feature of a failed technological and economic ‘Time machines’ of a quite different kind appear to dream. The local ‘dream’ offered by DeLorean, of course, interest Michael Hogg who, like Moorehead, has based

46 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 sculptural objects on historically specific mechanisms. Sandra Johnston. Johnston will present a video work in The machines constructed by Hogg are, however, some the exhibition (central to which is a centuries-old text distance from the luxuries of late capitalism – his inspi- detailing military tactics in Derry, which at first appears ration being drawn from scientific inquiry. One recent to denote more recent trauma) but she has also developed body of work, for instance, is based on the eighteenth- work for A Long Weekend in the autumn. Vital to her ‘public’ practice is extensive, if unobtrusive, ‘surveil- lance’ of local environments and lifestyles; she gathers details, hoping to learn about distinctive attitudes in a locality so as to intensify communication and interac- tion with audiences. Johnston’s “site reactive performance actions”16 are thus attentive to context and community and in this she is not alone: over the Long Weekend several artists will engage with specific sites and constituen- cies in Venice (taking into account private and public histories, contemplating spatial phenomena and social

Sandra Johnston: Even as we speak, 2005, performance still; Peter Richards: Saturday by numbers, 2004, pinhole document of courtesy Tonic Design live event; courtesy Tonic Design

century model of planetary motion, the orrery, which was practices) while others will also seize on the opportunity constructed so as to also properly represent the passage of participating in the Biennale to import idiosyncratic of time. Hogg’s sculptural re-interpretations of such aspects of Belfast’s cultural life. The project to be under- inventions necessitate concentrated attention, an almost taken by Peter Richards will be in the former category undetectable pace of movement being integral to their and will involve yet more extended observation of place; operation. This observation of barely discernable shifts the artist’s proposal being to use a camera obscura to over an extended period has, of course, obvious allegori- capture scenes associated with classical paintings of the cal significance in the context of Northern Ireland, but city. For Enlightenment thinkers this technology often for Mulholland, no doubt, such work might also prompt served as a model for vision’s relation to rational thought, ‘looking outwards’ to the nature of things beyond – such demonstrating the division between interior and exterior “precarious objects”15 (to borrow Katrina Moorehead’s worlds. Richards’ project will offer a problematic take on term for her own work) need not be entirely reduced to vision, subjectivity and space, merging the artist’s perspec- metaphors for ‘precarious’ politics. tive with other points of view, present and past. The amalgamation of ‘private’ and ‘public’ in these views of A loose connection might be identified between the Venice also, therefore, involves ‘anxious crossings’ between process of patient viewing entailed by Hogg’s practice and understandings of nature and culture, and in another of the intensive observation of places and people valued by the site-specific works this is a defining consideration.

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 47 Alistair Wilson’s project will respond to the natural and cultural peculiarities of Venice, creating a sound work for a cloister and garden area of a building which has a tendency to flood during days of acqua alta – the high tides that suggest an always imminent return of ‘the nature of things.’ Wilson’s installation will play culture against nature by using equipment reminiscent of that used to measure environmental conditions, but which in this instance emits sounds suggestive of elemental forces.

A force of another kind has determined Aisling O’Beirn’s engagement with the specifics of Venice – her experience of the city being influenced by the overwhelming might of the tourist industry. In response to the guided sight- seeing of mass tourism – and to the transient, spectacular experience of the Biennale – O’Beirn will use humble

Alistair Wilson: Turning back the tide, studio installation; courtesy Tonic Design means to probe notions of the local, asking how cultural forms and narratives translate. Her approach will be to introduce stories from Belfast into the fabric of Venice, printing narrative fragments onto the cappuccino cups in a café popular with Venetians and onto bags of pigeon feed bought by the hordes of tourists in Piazza San Marco. This enabling of informal encounters between Aisling O’Beirn: Stories for Venetians and tourists, 2005; courtesy disparate localities will also be important to the contri- Tonic Design bution of the Belfast collective Factotum, who will produce a special edition of their much-loved (though often ignorantly condemned) magazine The Vacuum. appear than a discussion of international contemporary The Venice edition of this iconoclastic newspaper will be art exhibitions. appropriately themed around the idea of cultural fairs and ‘Great Exhibitions’, making available a range of alternative Just as in Belfast, The Vacuum will be distributed freely perspectives on cultural display – as such a feature on the throughout the city, allowing diverse audiences to study Royal Ulster Agricultural Show might be more likely to its curious content in unlikely places (it should be added,

48 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 of course, that this edition will be translated into Italian). Nevertheless, still more curious encounters are possible Artists representing Northern Ireland: Peter Richards, Seamus over the Long Weekend, as the population of Venice will Harahan, Nicholas Keogh, Richard West (Factotum), Sandra Johnston, Paddy Bloomer, Alistair Wilson, Ian Charlesworth, be introduced to yet another public work that integrates Mary McIntyre, Darren Murray, Stephen Hackett (Factotum), odd bits and pieces of Belfast life. This final element of Aisling O’Beirn, Michael Hogg, William McKeown, Katrina Northern Ireland’s contribution is the extraordinary Bin Moorhead. boat dreamt up by Nicholas Keogh and Patrick Bloomer – Artists representing the Republic of Ireland: Stephen Brandes, a ‘party’ boat made for the canals of Venice, which, unfath- Mark Garry, Ronan McCrea, Sarah Pierce, Isabel Nolan, Joe omably, incorporates into its design a Belfast ‘wheelie Walker, Pat Walker. bin’. If, to return to Louis Aragon, the ‘marvellous’ is an “eruption of contradiction into the real,” then, perhaps, 1Maria De Corral, curator’s introduction to The Experience of Art, www. the prospect of this bin boat’s presence at the Biennale labiennale.org/en/visualarts/51iae/de-corral.html, February 2005 2Rosa Martínez, curator’s introduction to Always A Little Further, www. can indeed be described – along with many of the other labiennale.org/en/visualarts/51iae/martinez.html, February 2005 3Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic, London: Verso, 1990, p. 28 4Hugh Mulholland, press release for The Nature of Things: Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale, April 2005 5Jean Fisher, Vampire in the Text: Narratives of Contemporary Art, London: INIVA, 2003, p. 171

Nicholas Keogh and Patrick Bloomer: Bin disco, Belfast, 2003; courtesy Tonic Design

6Walter Benjamin, A Berlin chronicle, in One Way Street and other Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, London: Verso, 1997, p. 298 7Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty, London: MIT Press, 1993, p. xix 8Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, London: Jonathan Cape, 1971, p. 217 9James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, London: Pimlico, 2000, p. 75 Factotum: cover of The Vacuum (‘Sex’ issue); courtesy Tonic 10ibid. p. 81 Design 11ibid. p. 76 12Isabel Nolan, catalogue essay, for William McKeown, The Sky Begins at Our Feet, Belfast: Ormeau Baths Gallery, 2002 projects discussed here – according to such a designa- 13Raymond Carver, The phenomenon, in All of Us: The Collected Poems, tion. Though, to borrow once again from Hal Foster, this London: Harvill, 1996, pp. 186-187 14 instance of the surreal will undoubtedly involve ‘anxious Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, London: MIT Press, 1992, p. 167 crossings’ of one kind or another. 15From Katrina Moorehead, artist’s statement, April 2005 16From Sandra Johnston, artist’s statement, April 2005 Declan Long is a lecturer at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 49 DISCIPLINING THE AVANT-GARDE: THE UNITED STATES VERSUS THE CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE

In the United States, one private tragedy last year triggered an Orwellian chain of repres- sive official responses. In this article, Gregory Sholette describes the dynamic that may now characterise the American state and its attitude to artist-led ‘political’ intervention.

It’s vitally important whenever we think about insur- and embedded reporting, is the targeted suspension of gency to remember that the essence of any insurgency habeas corpus and mass cataloging of thousands of Islamic, and its most decisive battle space is the psychological. Middle Eastern, or North African people inside the country. In the 1960s, insurgency was referred to as armed Thousands of individuals have been detained without trial, theater, which I think is a really poignant way of others deported, and some have been sent abroad into thinking about it. ‘extra-juridical’ zones within Pakistan and Syria where Steven Metz, U.S. Army War College Strategic human rights do not stand in the way of extreme interroga- Studies Institute.1 tion methods.4

It comes as no surprise therefore that those who publicly There’s somethin’ happenin’ here. question aspects of the new, homeland-security state What it is ain’t exactly clear. apparatus also find themselves victims of government Buffalo Springfield investigation and intimidation. While certainly not on par with disappearances and torture, scores of artists, journal- ists and academics, including several high school students, 1. Birth of the Homeland Security State Apparatus have been questioned recently about alleged anti-American activities by a variety of Federal and local law-enforcement It has been three and one half years since President George officials. In at least one case, the one that concerns this W. Bush proclaimed, “you’re either with us or against us.”2 essay, the U.S. government is aggressively seeking to portray Since that time the neo-liberal ‘revolution’ has undergone a a group of contemporary artists known for their politically re-Balkanization in the United States. Gone is the ideology provocative, yet legal and Constitutionally protected art, as of fluidity and openness that presided over the post-Cold a full-blown terrorist threat to the national security. War years and in its place comes a new nationalist spirit complete with rising trade tariffs and a variety of seemingly Since 11 September 2001, the FBI and the Secret Service expedient security measures that have evolved into a new have interrogated gallery curators in Chicago and Dallas way of life.3 From no-fly lists to ubiquitous public surveil- for displaying images they deemed suspicious; accused a lance, from severe visa and immigration restrictions to the Nevada man of “borderline terrorism” because he had a fingerprinting of tourists, ‘bunker America’ is replacing bumper sticker that read “KING GEORGE – Off With His the fantasy of globalization. Even unilateral military action Head”; detained and questioned a Colorado highschool is justified as a preemptive defense of the homeland. principle for permitting students to sing the Bob Dylan Meanwhile, the rest of the world is offered Pax Americana, tune Masters of war during a public performance; and the a sanctimonious sop revealing perhaps what was at stake culture-jamming group AdBusters were questioned by all along, nothing less than global supremacy. Less well government agents over a flag-like billboard they installed known at home, however, thanks to guilt-free ‘happy’ news in Times Square. Secret Service agents even prevented two

50 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 teachers from attending a Bush rally because they wore t- of several prize-winning journalists effectively demonstrates shirts printed with the words “Protect our civil liberties.” that challenging Bush administration policy even from The atmosphere of enhanced public security has appar- within mainstream media can have considerable conse- ently also emboldened some local law enforcement to quences.5 disregard this very advice. Police in Albany arrested a man for wearing a peace sign on his T-Shirt; a young man was The most alarming of these cases so far is certainly the arrested outside an Armed Forces Career Center in Boston U.S. Attorney General William Hochel’s unrelenting inves- for dressing up as a U.S. torture victim in Iraq; six men tigation of artist Steven Kurtz and his former colleague, were arrested in Pennsylvania for creating an Abu Ghraib- Professor Robert Ferrell. Kurtz is a professor of art at style human pyramid as the President’s motorcade drove the University of Buffalo in New York. He is also a co- past; and in August 2004 founder of the Critical Art during the Republican Ensemble (CAE), an artists’ National Convention collective that dates from the New York Police 1986 which has become Department went so far as known for its multi-media to take thousands of people projects splicing Brechtian into custody, holding pedagogy onto the them long past the legal comedic diligence of a Mr. twenty-four-hour limit in Wizard.6 Donning white appalling conditions at a lab coats and assuming concrete and steel pier on the personae of amateur the Hudson River. scientists, they arm themselves with highschool Probing calls from Federal lab equipment as well agents to university as common household administrators have added supplies and groceries in to a chilling climate of order to demystify, or more suspicion within academia to the point, democratize already apprehensive over the increasingly priva- Congressional debates tized worlds of science, about alleged anti- technology and informa- American curricula and tion networks. These over student groups like the often-playful routines ultra-conservative Campus contrast with the serious Watch, who openly stake intent and analytical out ‘liberal’ instructors approach of the group’s in order to document numerous books and their so-called Left bias. manifestos. In Electronic Critical Art Ensemble / Beatriz da Costa and Shyh-shiun Professors at universities Shyu: poster from Free Range Grain, 2003; courtesy media. Civil Disturbance, CAE in New Mexico, Houston, celebrates anti-corporate, Urbana-Champaign, ‘slacker’ Ludditism and in South Florida, Upstate New York and even Columbia Digital Resistance they provide plans for making graffiti- University in New York City have discovered that raising writing robots and reprogramming Nintendo games questions about U.S. policy, about Israel, about 911 and so that children will gain “the means to bring about a homeland security inside the classroom can bring on situation in which a process of broad spectrum invention, disciplinary action and even dismissal. Regrettably, several discovery, and criticality can occur” (page 139). Whether in university museum directors at Arizona State University, a museum, an international conference, on the street or in the City Museum of Washington, and Ohio University have print, the CAE’s work unvaryingly aims to inform, entertain gone so far as to actively self-censor their own exhibitions and demonstrate the value of public knowledge. by removing socially critical work or by adding art that reflects a ‘conservative’ point of view. Meanwhile, the firing For the past several years the group has focused attention

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 51 on what they see as the misuse of biotechnology by private CAE’s signature approach to tactical media is a decidedly corporations operating outside the realm of democratic, self-reflexive one in so far as the group frequently applies public debate. CAE’s tactical response is what they term do-it-yourself (DIY) maneuvers to science and technology ‘Fuzzy Biological Sabotage’ or FBS, a type of sophisticated, in order to reveal the underlying, ideological administra- prank that uses harmless biological agents including plants, tion of knowledge itself. At the same time, the group links insects, reptiles and even microorganisms to operate in tactical media to a distinctly anti-modern form of ‘cellular’ the grey, in-between spaces as yet unregulated by institu- collectivism and political autonomy.10 For now, I want to tional regimes.7 In 2002 the group demonstrated one form underscore the significance to CAE of this avowed amateur- of FBS in the project Contestational Biology, which was ism while suggesting it may also be playing a central role in developed in conjunction with artists Beatriz de Costa and the group’s recent predicament with Federal authorities. Claire Pentecost and installed at the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington DC. Contestational Biology consisted of an CAE has stated that, ‘amateur’ scientific experiment that ‘reverse engineered’ samples of the Monsanto Corporation’s Round-Up Ready Amateurs have the ability to see through corn, canola and soy products, three of the many genetically dominant paradigms, are freer to recombine modified organisms rapidly being integrated into modern elements of paradigms thought long dead, agriculture industry. The ultimate goal of the installation, and can apply everyday life experience however, was to raise public awareness about the sweeping to their deliberations. Most important, privatization of the human food supply by directly contest- however, amateurs are not invested in insti- ing Monsanto’s right to create and patent customized life tutional systems of knowledge production forms for corporate profit. and policy construction, and hence do not have irresistible forces guiding the outcome All of CAE’s writings and projects converge around a single of their process…11 objective: a sustained effort to de-familiarize forms of civil disobedience in order to re-invent new ways of responding For a thirty-three-billion-dollar homeland state- critically to contemporary, social and political reality. They security apparatus dedicated to patrolling the insist therefore that, periphery and reinstating war-time discipline, such calls made by self-acknowledged dissidents Outdated methods of resistance must be refined, for the founding of new, amateur forms of ‘fuzzy’ and new methods of disruption invented that resistance may seem merely curious. Or they may attack power (non)centers on the electronic level.8 appear outright devious. As military theorist Steven Metz argues, the essence of insurgency is Strongly influenced by the theories of Michael Foucault and not seizing territory, but rather sending messages Giles Deleuze, CAE perceives political power as operating to a wider audience through a type of politicized more or less anonymously within, or across, a deterritori- theatre.12 alized, postindustrial environment. In light of this, most past forms of activist confrontation are largely useless. 2. Art is not terrorism Out of necessity therefore, political resistance must adapt by appropriating the same evanescent digital networks as On the morning of 21 May, 2004, Steven Kurtz awoke corporate and state power, while endlessly recalibrating to find his wife Hope lying unresponsive beside him. their critical interventions in the form of ‘tactical media’. Kurtz immediately called paramedics. On arrival, the medical response team took notice of assorted laboratory According to David Garcia and Geert Lovink ‘tactical equipment in the home, including Petri dishes, microscopes media’ occurs whenever cheap, and test tubes. Nervously, local police alerted the FBI. The Joint Terrorism Task Force soon descended on the Kurtz ‘do it yourself’ media, made possible by home and in a scene reminiscent of the 1971 techno- the revolution in consumer electronics and thriller The Andromeda Strain agents wearing white Haz- expanded forms of distribution (from public Mat (Hazardous Materials) suits cordoned off the house, access cable to the internet), are exploited by confiscated the body of Kurtz’s wife, and gathered a variety groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by, of materials for scientific analysis. They also impounded or excluded from, the wider culture.9 the artist’s passport, lesson plans, books, automobile,

52 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 computers, and cat. labeled as a hazardous ‘biological agent’.

By the next day the New York’s Commissioner of Public Commenting on the potential charges, Donald A. Hender- Health officially reported that nothing hazardous was son, Dean emeritus of the Johns Hopkins University School discovered in the home and no danger to the public existed. of Hygiene and Public Health, pointed out that, Hope had died of a heart attack. Nonetheless, the house was under quarantine for six days during which time Kurtz was …based on what I have read and understand, placed under surveillance for twenty-two hours. FBI agents Professor Kurtz has been working with totally did not arrest him, but put him up in a hotel, together with innocuous organisms…none of the organisms noted collaborator and family friend Claire Pentecost, who had to be present in this case are covered, nor should they recently arrived from Chicago. The agency even purchased be, by the post-9/11 provisions.16 Kurtz dinner with the hopes of uncovering more informa- tion. At one point Pentecost was taken aside and asked To the surprise of no one who knew Kurtz or the work if Kurtz had ever advocated the overthrow of the United of CAE, after it met on 15 June the Grand Jury rejected States government.13 all charges of bioterrorism. Once again, the unpleasant incident appeared about to conclude, with Kurtz antici- At the time of his wife’s tragic death, Kurtz and CAE were pating a public apology like that extended to Brandon finishing work on a project entitled Free Range Grains Mayfield, the Islamic convert from Oregon who was involving a do-it-yourself DNA-extraction laboratory escorted in handcuffs from his place of work and accused for testing for the presence of genetically altered genes, of involvement in the Madrid train bombings.17 Optimism or trans-genes, in store-bought groceries. The project was short-lived, however. On 22 June, CAE’s publisher, was to have been installed in an upcoming exhibition Autonomedia, was subpoenaed, indicating the investiga- entitled The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere at tion was not yet over.18 Before long, Kurtz and Farrell the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.14 It found themselves facing up to twenty years in prison on was the presence of these laboratory materials, together downsized charges of mail fraud for the alleged mishan- with three types of harmless bacteria procured for the dling of bacterial samples purchased from a scientific group’s next project about the history of U.S. bio-warfare supply house.19 As of this writing the investigation grinds programs, which led to the investigation, because prior to on still, and renewed charges involving bioterrorism may be the unexpected death of his wife there is no evidence Kurtz lodged soon following a second Grand Jury hearing on 19 or CAE were of interest to the FBI.15 April, 2005.20

Eventually, Hope’s body was returned for burial, but the The public sullying of a white and otherwise privileged FBI retained the artist’s passport, books, and computer. academic’s reputation is not unique these days. Doctor Still, up to this point, the incident appeared to be a case of Thomas Butler, a world-renowned specialist who researches jittery officials who, in the aftermath of the still unsolved bubonic plague, has also received similar treatment by anthrax mail murders of 2001, reacted to the discovery Federal officials. In January of 2003, Butler noticed thirty of a premature death and the presence of unexpected lab vials of the bacteria missing from his lab. Assuming the equipment with an indiscriminate response. That was samples were misplaced, but erring on the side of caution, the assumption at least, until several CAE members and he reported their absence to the FBI. As someone with a collaborators were handed subpoenas by Federal agents history of security clearance, he trusted the government at the Mass MoCA opening that directed them to appear and signed away his rights to legal defense. He was then before a Federal Grand Jury last June. Nine people were arrested. “I was tricked and deceived,” said Butler on CBS’s served subpoenas by June, and while neither the FBI nor 60 Minutes. “I was naïve to have trusted them and the assur- the Attorney General would make public the details of their ances they gave me.” Butler was charged with sixty-nine probe, it was evident from the wording in the documents criminal counts, including everything from bioterror to tax that Kurtz was being investigated under U.S. Code Title 18, evasion, and even though the sixty-two-year-old scientist Part I, Chapter10, Sec. 175: Prohibitions with respect to was, like Kurtz, acquitted of all terror-related charges, he Biological Weapons. The scope of this statute was greatly was instead indicted for financial misconduct and has lost expanded by the USA Patriot Act of 2001. So much so that his job, his doctor’s license, is financially broke, and still some speculate even the harmless, research bacteria of the faces several years in prison.21 The National Academy of type Kurtz obtained for CAE art projects might now be Sciences and the Institute of Medicine sent a letter to the

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 53 United States Attorney General warning against “…the Federal government for its handling of this case has not impact that Butler’s case may have on other scientists who been nearly as intense or widespread as the outcry during may be discouraged from embarking upon or continuing the so-called ‘culture wars’ of the 1990s.27 Gradually, crucial bioterrorism-related scientific research.”22 however, these disturbing stories are beginning to align and in the process provoke an inevitable question: is the United Meanwhile, state intervention aimed at regulating scien- States re-entering a period of political and cultural repres- tific research has been increasingly visible of late. The sion like that experienced during the Palmer Raids of the Bush administration demanded the right to approve all 1910s or the McCarthy era of the 1950s? Without denying U.S. scientists selected for the World Health Organization; the possibility of a return to such overt political tyranny, I the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services think it necessary to make this all-too-convenient hypoth- blocked scientists from traveling to the International esis more problematic.28 AIDS Conference in Bangkok; and in March of this year, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) received a For one thing, the abuse of civic and human rights has letter charging it with creating “a crisis for microbiologi- been an enduring feature of U.S. military and law enforce- cal research.” The letter was signed by more than half of ment throughout our history, from Wounded Knee and the the scientists whom the NIH helps employ.23 The charge conquest of California, to the annexation of the Philippines of promoting ‘junk science’ and manipulating data is now on up to the present. What has not happened to white, increasingly being leveled at the White House, including middle-class Americans since the early 1980s is the system- recently by twenty Nobel Laureates.24 David Schubert, atic retraction of constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties. head of the Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk At that time the FBI investigated and infiltrated U.S.-based Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, went so far as to supporters of political refugees from El Salvador. For say that there has been, another thing, the very threat of such a return to the bad old days is useful in itself as a type of disinformation. Panic …an unprecedented assault by the executive drove many in the 1950s to abandon hope of a constitu- branch of our government upon the ability tionally based, legal defense. Self-censorship and political of U.S. scientists to freely share their data resignation soon followed. Even the Communist Party USA, and insights about our world with the public. the primary target of the government’s assault, concluded it Much of the justification for this repres- was better to go underground than publicly face what was sion of scientific communication falls under wrongly theorized to be the rise of full-blown American the Orwellian concept of “sound science,” Fascism.29 An ideological battlefield was quickly trans- which is clearly understood by the scientific formed into a game of shooting fish in a barrel. community to mean the misrepresentation of scientific data to reflect the administration’s Therefore, perhaps a better way to phrase our hypothesis is political and social agendas.25 to ask why it is that the post-911 ideological landscape and the CAE investigation appear at once so familiar and simul- All the while this dampening effect is taking place with taneously so very strange? regard to certain types of scientific research, and as restric- tive prohibitions are enacted on information sharing, the 3. Managing Dissent U.S. government’s spending on biological-weapons research has reached unprecedented levels.26 State intervention into the production and distribution of culture is as enduring as the history of nations is long. Unlike many people who have been investigated or outright Think of Plato’s injunction against poets and painters in his disappeared since 911, the members of CAE are reason- ideal Republic or Stalin’s decree enforcing Socialist Realism ably well known figures within the international art world. in mid-1930s, as well as, of course, the House Un-American Moral and material support has arrived from dozens of Activities Committee’s witch-hunting of Hollywood radicals countries, and a recent auction of artwork by artists such in the 1950s. Modern bourgeois societies have evolved as Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser, Martha Rosler, Carl Andre, two seemingly contradictory modes of state control. One and Joseph Kosuth among others was staged at a major of these is the isolation and overt suppression of select Chelsea art gallery in New York. Yet, while the Kurtz / CAE individuals, groups or ideological positions allegedly carried case has received a relatively high degree of attention in the out in defense of the freedom or morality of an alleged mainstream press and within the art world, criticism of the majority interest.30 This type of explicit control reappears

54 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 cyclically in the United States, especially whenever govern- Cold War stage during the late 1960s. Not the state, but ment or big business is threatened by collective dissent corporate America led the way this time by converting emerging ‘from below’. Its most recent full-scale manifes- from the production of goods to the selling of lifestyles. tation took place immediately after World War II when Patched and faded jeans, Che Guevarra accessories and the militant labor unions, communists, and other Left radicals, homely VW Beetle were soon the ultimate symbols of hip grown strong during the anti-fascist Popular Front years, or what Tom Frank describes as a counter-cultural capital- were systematically eradicated through a combination of ist orthodoxy.33 And while resistance to the authority of legal and extra-constitutional measures. Before it was over, state power remains tenacious, its changing forms are no thousands of men and women were investigated, lost their less a product of the historical moment than is national- jobs and / or were blacklisted in the name of freedom and ism, imperialism and so forth. Such opposition has run democracy.31 Many of the gamut from bourgeois these people worked in revolutionaries in the the culture industries and coffee houses of the seven- academia. While such overt teenth century, to the Paris repression is extremely Commune of 1871, to effective in the short-run, the turn-of-the-century the same establishment that anarcho-syndicalism of unleashed it will eventu- the International Workers ally denounce tyranny of the World (IWW). as antithetical to the free After the Second World society it claims to protect. War, the New Left turned So even as the hammer against centralized Old Left of law enforcement was politics as the Civil Rights descending on individual and other minority-based radicals and nonconform- liberation movements ists, a subtler means for re-centered anti-nation- managing dissent was alist sentiment around coming to fruition. After individual freedoms and all, the Cold War was, aside / or cultural identity. from some hot moments Curiously, even the punks in Greece, Korea and Cuba, overt negation of the primarily a battle over 1960s was carried out in which system could deliver the name of anti-state, a superior way of life to cultural anarchism, just as its citizens. Government today, informal collective leaders may have sought to such as Reclaim the Streets, overcome the missile gap, Carnival Against Capital but just as significant and Indymedia reflect the were gaps in refrigerator, green-anarchist and indig- Janet Galore / Deborah F. Lawrence: poster for CAE defense- stove and automobile fund benefit; courtesy the artists enous-peoples movements production. Not surpris- that are militantly opposed ingly there was also a to globalization and culture gap. As Eva Cockroft, Serge Gilbaut and others have centralized authority. Under the circumstances stealing demonstrated the U.S. State Department actively supported the state has been transformed into stealing corporate the display and export of American art abroad. This power in order that it may be redirected towards alterna- included avant-garde painting and sculpture, which became tive, people-centered purposes. As the activist art group a global advertisement for capitalism’s apparently infinite Yomango insists, “Dare to desire: YOMANGO is your style: tolerance of artistic expression and individual freedom.32 risky, innovative. It is the articulate proliferation of creative gestures.”34 It comes as no surprise therefore that capitalist marketing barely broke stride as the counter-culture blasted onto the Nevertheless it is crucial to note that powerful, anti-state

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 55 sentiments are also shared by right-wing libertarians and styles of business management emerge directly modeling assorted religious fundamentalists, as well as by a group themselves after experimental, avant-garde and even of highly influential, ‘centrist’ policy makers who, not critical forms of culture. Frank’s counter-cultural capitalist so long ago, prophesized a future in which the global orthodoxy is one such example, with its rapid-fire absorp- marketplace would gradually subjugate national territories. tion of all that is new and different, that is then re-packaged NeoLiberalsm – from Reagan and Thatcher on up to Bill and sold back to us as an ersatz ‘otherness.’ Consider now Clinton – is typically described as a response to the capital the highly successful CEO Al West who runs a risk-manage- crisis of the late 1970s, and in his influential study The ment firm near Philadelphia in which employees serve on Condition of Postmodernity David Harvey argues that fluid, multi-disciplinary teams and re-arrange portable the floating exchange rates and financial networks of the office furniture to suit the evolving needs of projects. The 1980s permitted corporations to outmaneuver national few walls that exist inside the company’s postmodern interests in what he labels a regime of ‘flexible’ capital headquarters display contemporary artwork, some of it accumulation.35 Even if by some accounts Neoliberalism strange and disturbing to workers. West explains that his was only a method for stabilizing U.S. national markets objective is to help people ‘get out of the box.’ “We want over and against all others,36a perspective that recent them to think creatively, so why not highlight these pieces? moves towards protectionism may bear out, one thing most That’s what art is all about – doing it in a different way…” analysts agree upon is that the last thirty years and up until Meanwhile, West’s management theory sounds as if it came 911 has seen a reduction of state influence in economic from the pages of Artforum or even the anarchist zine matters, the globalization of production, an emerging class Clamor rather than from the Wall Street Journal. of mobile, creative laborers, and a rise, especially evident in the immediate post-Cold War era, of a technological It used to be that information would entrepreneurialism that prompted one noted commentator flow up to one spot, and then the to triumphantly proclaim the arrival of “a certain uniform- decision we make would flow back ity of economic and political institutions across different down. That’s no longer a good model. regions and cultures,” and ultimately to theorize the end of …. In today’s environment, you turn history itself.37 the organization upside down.40

This flexible accumulation finds its behavioral corollary Drawing an even tighter circle around contemporary art in what theorist Brian Holmes describes as the “flexible practices and business theory, Matthew Jesse Jackson writes personality”: in a recent piece for the New Left Review suggestively entitled Managing the avant-garde that, …an internalized and culturalized pattern of “soft” coercion, which nonetheless can be Power in the art world is shifting away from the directly correlated to the hard data of labor tenured stasis of academia to cultural actors plugged conditions, bureaucratic and police practices, directly into the entrepreneurial sector. And with this border regimes and military interventions.38 transformation, subversive ‘anti-institutional’ institu- tional changeability has become the defining cultural According to Holmes, the new conditions erase the division mandate of the neoliberal world order.41 between consumption and production and worker aliena- tion seems to vanish as “individuals aspire to mix their Is it too far a stretch to suggest their exists a structural and labor with their leisure.” Even businesses began to see historical correlation between such vanguard management themselves as a “sphere of creative activity, of self-realiza- ideology, with its flexible, at times experimental approach tion” in which the new, ‘net’ worker becomes “the manager to worker productivity and happiness, and the forms (not of his or her own self-gratifying activity.”39 That is, at least content), of tactical media?42 as long as happy-work leads to a product worthy of profit- able exchange. Significantly, it is this anarcho-capitalist dream of unimpeded financial networks and frictionless exchange 4. The End of the Flexible Personality? that has recently hit a roadblock, or should I say ‘road- bush’? Free-market subterfuge has been replaced by It is at this moment, in the glow of these softly regulated pious demolition and occupation. For compared to past modes of precarious, creative labor, that seemingly radical conservative regimes in the U.S. that have favored isolation-

56 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 ism over militarism, the Bush Doctrine is something of a nebulous terrain of power that the state now deems its chimera.43 With the appetite of unrepressed, free-market privileged concession to own, lend out, or direct. Is it any capitalism, its heart is filled with the moral righteousness of wonder authorities compare CAE to terrorists? Kurtz and missionary Christianity. (Nor can one help but notice that his colleagues sinned yet a second time and really brought its body is designed for old-fashioned imperialist conquest.) down ‘the man’ when they published manuals explicat- Therefore, when comparisons are made between past and ing how to make use of this counter-knowledge, including present instances of state-sponsored oppression, contradic- its tactics and invisible circuitry, and did so not with the tions of this magnitude must be factored in. Indeed, the ambiguous idioms of art-speak, but rather with the deter- modern state’s apparently bifurcated response to political mined hyper-clarity of the techno-geek. dissent – carefully targeted, yet outright repression on the one hand and repressive tolerance manifest by commodity This is where something far more grotesque than a simple culture on the other – is not, strictly speaking, an ideologi- return to the past begins to be teased out of an otherwise cal reaction. For despite a superficial equivalence between incomprehensible instance of state censorship. It is a conservative and liberal regimes respectively, the twin warning aimed as much at the avant-garde, entrepreneurial tactics of state social control more accurately correspond to spirit of the dot-comers as it is against a group of inter- the changing needs and pressures arising from the need to disciplinary artists who refuse to stay in their assigned manage unstable markets for maximum capital accumula- role as isolated cultural workers. Yet if the buzzword of tion. In other words, if flexibility, openness and tolerance, bunker America is “get back in your box!” there must be were the watchwords of art, science and industry, especially no equivocation regarding support for those being targeted immediately following the end of the Cold War, then the by the new, homeland-security state apparatus. To speak new maxims of the homeland security state apparatus are up against its creeping authoritarianism, to do so loudly restraint, insularity, and suspicion.44 wherever we are, whenever we have the opportunity, in large or small ways, means never acting alone, but instead 5. Conclusion acting collectively. To not act, as Bertolt Brecht precisely summarizes, is to accept the ignominious verdict of history: In this sense the seemingly post-rational, political agenda of the Bush Doctrine might be a refreezing of selected They won’t say: the times were dark. Rather: why portions of the de-territorialized network that Hardt and were their poets silent?47 Negri posited in their influential study, Empire. Likewise, the investigation and intimidation of journalists, scientists, Gregory Sholette is a NYC based artist and writer whose academics and artists may be more than just a public scape- critical texts on activist art have appeared in the journals goating of relatively powerless individuals and groups. Third Text, Oxford Art Journal, Afterimage, Mute, and It might instead be aimed at loudly signaling an end to online at republicart.org and the InterActivistInfoExchange. the interdisciplinary, trans-national entrepreneurialism He is co-editor of The Interventionists: A Users Manuel that dominated the pre-911 technological, economic, and for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life and the forth- cultural environment.45 coming Collectivism After Modernism about the little- known history of post-war, collective art. In 2002 Sholette That is not to say that capitalism will never again chant was a guest of the Arts Council of Ireland as a participant the mantra of 90s management guru Tom Peters, “Never in the Critical Voices programme. hire anyone without an aberration in their background.”46 Nor will it, at the mere invocation of anti-authoritarian The author extends his appreciation to Lucia Sommer for her ideas, react as it has in the CAE case, at least not based on assistance researching this article. the facts thus far. Instead, what sets this moment apart is the re-sanctification of the state as transcendent fetish and a concomitant re-disciplining of ambiguous, unmanage- able forms. This includes CAE. When CAE transformed various insurgent theories – be these avant-gardist or radical-corporate – into accessible, DIY procedures, and then directed a diffuse, yet unquestionably resistant force towards select, private and governmental targets, it publicly demonstrated its ability to operate within the same

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 57 1Steven Metz, Relearning Counterinsurgency: History lessons for on the internet, among other places at lists.virus.org/isn-0110/ Iraq, Afghanistan, and the global war on terror, The American msg00110.html. Enterprise Institute, 10 January 2005; transcript at www.aei. 16Quoted in Anti-biotech artist indicted for possessing ‘harmless’ org/events/filter.,eventID.982/transcript.asp bacteria by Brendan Coyne, The New Standard, 6 July, 2004; 2George W. Bush in a joint news conference with French available at newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_ President Jacques Chirac, 6 November, 2001 item&itemid=646. Furthermore, the bacteria purchased by 3Some who read this sentence will naturally question my use of Kurtz and Ferrell is often used in high-school and middle-school the term ‘openness’ and point to the harsh political attacks on classrooms. artists such as Karen Finley, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andreas 17An illegible fingerprint faxed to the U.S. from Spain was later Serrano among others in the 1990s over their allegedly subver- blamed for Mayfield’s much publicized humiliation and the FBI sive images and performances. But the so-called ‘culture wars’ sheepishly admitted their blunder. was really Neo-Conservative 18The Attorney General ideology in vitro, whereas for apparently dropped this NeoLiberals it was primarily aspect of the investigation about transforming the To learn more about the CAE / Steve Kurtz affair, and possibly to lend a hand,visit caedefensefund.org. after being pressured by the National Endowment for the American Civil Liberties Arts (NEA) as into an insti- Union. tution actively promoting the 19If Kurtz and Farrell are privatization (commercialization) of culture. guilty of what they’re accused of doing, this would be no 4 The number of people involved is difficult to estimate but an more than a contract dispute over $256 of harmless bacteria. excellent website that includes a database of some who have Nevertheless, neither the company, American Cultures, who disappeared is www.disappearedinamerica.org. supplied the cultures, nor the University of Pittsburgh, through 5Details on many of these cases and over a hundred others are which the transaction occurred, have brought forth any charges. compiled by Matthew Rothschild in his McCarthyism Watch 20On 17 March, 2005, almost a year after the initial subpoenas Updates published by Progressive Magazine and available online were issued, Steve Barnes, another co-founder of CAE, was at www.progressive.org. See also: Temporary Services special issued a new subpoena listing upon it the U.S. Code Title website on the Resurgence of the Culture Wars at www.tempo- 18 Prohibitions with respect to Biological Weapons. Barnes raryservices.org/culture_wars.html. testified on 18 April and reports that new charges of bioterror 6Mr. Wizard was a popular U.S. television show in the 1950s and may be pending in the case. See: Artists experience déjà vu in 1960s in which an actor, Donald Herbert, demonstrated labora- ‘bioterror’ case that won’t go away by Brendan Coyne for The tory experiments for young people. New Standard, 25 April 25, 2005; also at newstandardnews.net/ 7See www.critical-art.net/biotech/conbio/index.html and The content/?items=1733. Molecular Invasion published by Autonomedia Books in 2002. 21See John Dudley Miller, Butler’s last stand: plague researcher 8Electronic Disturbance, CAE, p. 9 may receive a long prison term in fraud case, The Scientist, Volume 18, Issue 4, 1 March, 2004; www.thescientist.com/ 9David Garcia and Geert Lovink, The ABC’s of Tactical Media, yr2004/mar/prof2_040301.html. 1997; available at subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors2/garcia- 22 lovinktext.html The letter is available as a downloadable PDF file at www.fas. org/sgp/news/2003/08/nas081503.pdf. 10Blake Stimson and I elaborate on this concept of post-war 23 collective forms in our essay Periodizing collectivism, Third Rick Weiss, Scientists object to NIH’s bioterror focus, Text, Vol 18, No. 6, pp 573 – 585, and again in our forthcoming Washington Post, 1 March, 2005, p. A13 anthology Collectivism after Modernism for the University of 24James Glanz, Scientists accuse White House of Minnesota Press. distorting facts, New York Times, 18 February, 2004; 11Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance: Explorations in www.nytimes.com/2004/02/18/science/18CND- Tactical Media, Autonomedia Books, 2001, p. 9 RESE.html?ex=1078153306&ei=1&en=f23c8d5d6 2ce741. 12see endnote 1. 25David Schubert’s commentary was published in the conserva- 13Related by Claire Pentecost in a presentation at The Cooper tive newspaper San Diego Union-Tribune, 9 July 2004, p. B7; Union on 25 October, 2004. available at www.organicconsumers.org/corp/bushscience071604. 14 The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere, Massachusetts cfm. Museum of Contemporary Art, 30 May to 20 March, 2005. 26According to Debora MacKenzie, grants “for work on non- 15 No evidence of prior interest, that is to say with this one, biodefence disease germs fell 27%, while grants for studying possibly coincidental, caveat: a lecturer at the University of model bacteria such as Escherichia coli fell by a whopping 41%”; Illinois at Champaign-Urbana who baselessly stated, “the Critical Top U.S. biologists oppose biodefence boom, The New Scientist, Art Ensemble paints a picture of cyber-resistance that looks a lot March 2005; www.newscientist.com/channel/health/dn7074. like the descriptions of bin Laden’s alleged network.” Whether 27Martha Rosler pointed out to me that the CAE case is unlike Heidi Brush’s paper, Electronic jihad, was noticed by Federal that of Mapplethorpe, Serrano et al. in so far as it has not agents is anybody’s guess. It was, however, reported on by Kevin directly implicated cultural institutions or arts administrators. Is Featherly in Newsbytes, 16 October, 2001, and it was circulated

58 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 it also possible that ‘subversive’ sexual imagery, when decried as Gindin, The Socialist Register, 2005, pp. 24 & 26 amoral by the State, rallies those who defend individual liberty, 37Francis Fukuyama, The illusion of exceptionalism, Journal of whereas ‘subversive’ activism, when decried as terrorism, has an Democracy, 1997, 8.3, pp. 146 –-149l academic2.american. opposite, censorial effect? edu/~dfagel/Markets&democracyfukuyama.html. 28 Australian artist and writer Anna Munster is one of the few to 38Brian Holmes, The flexible personality for a new cultural challenge assumptions about neo-McCarthyism. However, she critique, p. 139, in Hieroglyphs of the Future, Arkzin publishers, hypothesizes that a far more ominous, matrix-like “bio-logic” , Croatia, 2001 is at work, and that CAE was snared by its self-regulating nodal 39ibid, p. 122 networks thanks to the chance occasion of Hope’s heart-attack. 40 Although Munster’s novel argument suffers from a lack of Quoted by John Dunn in Designing a business revolution, historical or economic analysis, she nonetheless offers several Georgia Tech Magazine, Vol. 76, No. 2, Fall 1999; gtalumni. insights, including her statement that the charges facing Kurtz org/Publications/magazine/fall99/west.html. and Ferrell arise from their 41Matthew Jesse Jackson, having violated “expectations Managing the avant-garde, pertaining to the conduct New Left Review, 32, March of intellectual and cultural –-April, 2005. p. 114 work.” Why is bioart not 42Taking this one large step terrorism?: some critical nodes further, the networked opera- in the networks of informatic tives of the financial world life; published in the e- who covertly seek to exploit or journal Culture Machine, bankrupt other corporations no. 7, 2005; culturemachine. and even nations, are veritable tees.ac.uk/frm_f1.htm. encyclopedias of tactical For a more grounded and methodology. Indeed, one thoroughly researched might even compare them to analysis of the CAE, see Al Queda agents if not for the Claire Pentecost, Reflections premium they place on self- on the case by the U.S. preservation. A good example Justice Department against is John Perkins, who “declares Steven Kurtz and Robert Free Range Grain, installation view, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, his guilt” in Confessions of an Ferrell, at www.caedefense- with Steve Kurtz in foreground; courtesy media.tactics Economic Hit Man, Berrett- fund.org/reflections.html. Koehler Publishers, San 29According to Francisco, 2004. Encyclopedia of the American Left, some 10,000 people may 43President Clinton’s former Undersecretary of Commerce for have lost their jobs during the McCarthy Era of the late 1940s International Trade, Jeffrey E. Garten, has warned that the new and early 1950s. (Eds Buhle, Buhle and Georgakas, Garland nationalism will lead to “escalating tensions between the U.S. Publishing NY and London, 1990, p. 459) and Europe over export subsidies, steel, agriculture, geneti- 30Remarkably, it was to protect the minority interest that cally modified food, and privacy regulations.” In The politics Constitutional freedoms were initially devised. of fortune: a new agenda for business leaders, on the website of 31See endnote 29. American Economic Alert at www.americaneconomicalert.org/ view_art.asp?Prod_ID=662. 32Eva Cockroft, Abstract Expressionism: weapon of the Cold War, 44 Artforum, June 1974, pp. 39 –-41; and Serge Guilbaut, How New Ironically, it is the liberal press that appears to be calling for a York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, Chicago University Press, return to the cultural politics of the Cold War years. In a New Chicago, 1983 York Times Op-Ed piece from 9 August, 2004 the ‘liberal’ paper implored the State Department to: 33Thomas Frank, Why Johnny can’t dissent, in Commodify your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffler, eds Thomas Frank and Matt find new public and private partners to help it shape a Weiland, W.W.Norton & Company, New York and London, 1997, coherent cultural policy and construct a broader and more p. 34 open system to select and finance artists for international exhibitions. Those artists are one of the best ways of letting 34See: Yomango.net as well as The Yes Men, who are perhaps the the world know that cultural freedom and excellence finest practitioners of pilfering corporate power today at www. matter in this country. p. 14, column 1. theyesmen.org. 45Undoubtedly creativity and innovation will, however, remain 35David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry central to the weapons, security, and surveillance industries. into the Origins of Cultural Change, Cambridge, MA, Blackwell 46 Publishers, first published in 1990 Tom Peters, quoted by Stefan Stern in A guru aims high on Prozac, www.work911.com/cgi-bin/links/jump.cgi?ID=4166 36“It was the threat of protectionism that the U.S. used to attack 47 those [other] countries unwilling to go global thereby transform- In dark times, 1936-1938, in Bertolt Brecht Poems, 1913-1956, ing the impulse for nationalism itself as a means of opening up eds J. Willett and R. Manheim with E. Fried, Methen Books, New markets,” in Finance and American empire, Leo Panitch and Sam York, Toronto, London, Sydney, 1976, p. 274.

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 59 PORTRAITURE AND SOCIAL CONTEXT – A CASE STUDY

The exhibition of a portrait of a convicted killer in Dublin in 2003 was held to be offensive by many. Maggie Deignan examines the context and the reactions.

In May 2003 a portrait was displayed at the 173rd exhibited their work in a group exhibition of prisoners exhibition of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), organised by the VEC in the Town Hall in Portlaoise Dublin, by artist Mick O’Dea, a member of the later that year. The portraits showed very good resem- Academy. The man portrayed, Brian Meehan, is a blance of their sitters. There was no adverse public prisoner in Portlaoise who was found guilty of the reaction to any of the exhibits. murder of a prominent Irish journalist, Veronica Guerin, and sentenced to life imprisonment. The In May of the following year, O’Dea selected six of following exploration does not set out in any way his own works to exhibit in that year’s RHA show. to argue against the extremely serious nature of the Although the exhibition is an open-submission show crime of the prisoner portrayed. Its objective is to involving a selection process, members such as O’Dea focus attention on an issue highlighted by the case: the are not subject to this procedure. One of the works he offence caused by the social context of the painting. selected was a portrait which he had painted during his This involved a broad adoption of a singular viewpoint prison project. This went on display in May. by the media and those members of the public who voiced opinions on the matter. The controversy began when retired Garda Detective Inspector Gerry O’Carroll phoned into the live RTÉ O’Dea has a history of working with prisoners, dating Radio One programme Liveline on Monday 26 May back to 1985. He has worked on the National College to express his outrage at the exhibition of the portrait of Art and Design art programme in Portlaoise prison, of the prisoner, which he had been informed was on and has occasionally undertaken workshops for the display. He described the sitter as an “evil, evil man,” Artists in Prisons scheme. In July 2002, he engaged in and said that the exhibiting of the portrait was “grossly one such workshop in Portlaoise with two prisoners offensive…at the very least, it is in appalling bad taste. who were interested in painting portraits. Over the At worst, it’s grossly offensive and highly insensitive.”1 course of his eight days there, five men volunteered to sit / model for the painters. O’Dea worked alongside the Many people phoned the radio programme to express men he was teaching and all three produced paintings similar viewpoints. There were calls to have the painting which they would later publicly exhibit. removed from the exhibition. O’Dea was contacted to respond, which he did. He defended his painting . On The two prisoners who had participated in the project the subject of the identity of his sitter he said, “I don’t

60 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 particularly look into their case myself, I am not a detective.”2 He added, “he sat very still. I found him very co-operative of the job being required. He gave me his full attention.” On his approach to portraiture he said, “my portraits are not formal portraits. They’re not about power or glorifica- tion. I try to show the common humanity of all people.”3 O’Dea says that although he was aware of the potential of this particular painting to cause controversy, he considered it amongst his best of the year’s work. He is also of the opinion that there can be a problem for artists of self-censorship in the interests of political correctness, which he wished to avoid.4 Michael O’Dea: Portrait of Brian Meehan, 2002; courtesy the artist In the week that followed

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 61 Page 14 of the Sunday World, 1 June 2003; reproduced with permission

62 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 Star, Daily Mirror, Sunday World, and of “a richly attired eighteenth- century couple on their all published articles on the subject. The issue was again estate.” The reason he did this was “just in case we discussed on Liveline, RTÉ 1, on The Show, should mistake this for a painting about the beauties of RTÉ 2, and on Morning Ireland, RTÉ 1. On the Morning the English countryside…In this way Berger invites us Ireland programme, the junior Minister for Defence, Willie to read the painting as a celebration of possession, of O’Dea, spoke vehemently against the inclusion of the ownership.”7 portrait in the exhibition. Even with the apparent relaxation of rigid social codes The RHA members, in response to the furore, held today, portraits often contain subtle hints as to the status a meeting on Tuesday, 27 May, at which they unani- of the sitter. It is significant that the attire of the prisoner mously decided not to remove the painting. A in the RHA portrait was commented on by the media. “It spokesman for the RHA said, shows the convicted killer in relaxed pose, hands clasped together, resting on a pair of white shorts he wears, We have no rule or diktat in this academy about while staring into space.”8 Another report observed an censoring an artist’s work. Each member of the additional detail –-“shorts and a black jumper.”9 academy has an equal standing but the artist Michael O’Dea made the final decision to keep The homage to success and ownership is not the sole the picture up, backed unanimously by the other traditional purpose of portraiture. A strong sense members.5 of moral purpose was another element of portrayal. An argument in relation of ‘sitter to society’ was The portrait remained on display at the Academy until put forward by painter Jonathan Ritchardson in his 28 June. writings. He said, “Painting gives not only the persons, but the characters of great men. The air of the head, Portraiture – issues of social context, ‘good taste’ and and the mien in general, give strong indications of the sensitivities mind.” Its function, he said, was “partly to improve and instruct us and to excite proper sentiments and Broadly, three issues of concern were highlighted by the reflections” like “a history, a poem, a book of ethics, or controversy. divinity.”10

1.What is the commonly perceived nature and function The sense of moral purpose in portraiture has of the portrait? continued to the present day to be commonly 2. What is it about this particular instance that gave rise desirable or even mandatory, as suggested by the to the unprecedented level of media attention? reaction to the RHA portrait. Dunne wrote that 3.What preconceptions underlie the terms ‘good’ or O’Dea’s portrait “does nothing to either demonise or ‘bad taste’? excuse its subject.”11 O’Dea himself has said that “My portraits are…not about power or glorification. I try Regarding the first issue, in Aidan Dunne’s view, “what to show the common denominator of humanity of all emerged from the controversy is a popular view of the people.”12 It is this non-judgmental attitude, it would portrait as an accolade and an honour.”6 There is ample seem, that does not comply with the traditional goal testimony to this proposition in the art galleries of of ‘improving and instructing us’, and the ordinari- Europe, and in Ireland’s National Gallery where many ness may not give the ‘strong indications of the mind’ rooms have walls hung with portraits of landed gentry. that would correspond with the viewers’ notion of a This paean to social success and possession has a broad criminal mind. If, as Wilton suggests, it is the case that correlation in portraiture today, as eighteenth- and “a likeness committed to canvas is a public injunction nineteenth-century landlords and the ruling establish- to emulation or abhorrence,”13 perhaps in the prison- ment have been gradually replaced by businessmen, er’s case, the sitter would have had to appear evil, or politicians and more recent establishment figures. tortured by guilt, or in some way disreputable to satisfy this requirement, or at least be firmly shown to be in a John Berger treated portraiture contextually by prison context instead of the featureless spaces, devoid facetiously putting a ‘trespassers will be prosecuted’ of social props, that O’Dea uses to focus on the essence sign on a reproduction of the Gainsborough painting of the person.

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 63 Part of page 13 of the Sunday World, 1 June 2003; reproduced with permission

this point when he says the “mere inclusion in the Academy is in some sense a moral endorsement.”14

That it may be inclusion in the Academy itself that is an issue is suggested when one examines the history in Ireland of the public exhibition of prisoner portraits, painted by prisoners themselves or by artists, most notably Brian Maguire. Maguire says that his purpose is “to harness the prejudice within society and play it back to the viewer.”15 Maguire has painted and displayed paintings of prisoners, occasionally high-profile men, and has done so in locations varying from street poster sites to arts centres to the more traditional venues, notably the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, without attracting nation-wide media opprobrium.16 However, the theme of these exhibitions was related to prison / prisoners.

Prisoners themselves have made and displayed portraits of each other without attracting excessive media attention. Here again, the context and theme of the exhibits was related to prison.

If the problem the public had with the RHA prisoner exhibit was not solely the portrait itself, it is possible that the particular context of the RHA may point to the cause. Social context –-the RHA Firstly, the portrait was painted by an artist upon whom had been conferred the establishment accolade of Royal Apart from the identity of the sitter, and the portrait Hibernian Artist. O’Dea was described on radio and in itself, the social context of the portrait seems to have newspaper reports as “a highly respected Irish artist.”17 been an even greater cause of grievance. Dunne makes

64 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 Secondly, the RHA is regarded as a prestigious venue. people. The new landowners commissioned their There are references to it throughout the controversy portraits to be painted in celebration of their elevated as “one of the country’s top galleries,” which has been positions in society, to hang in their houses and later, in “promoting arts in Ireland more than 170 years.”18 some instances, in gallery spaces. Another report stated that “the line between humani- tarian thoughtfulness and misguided thoughtlessness Considering their role in the oppression of the native was blurred when the Meehan portrait was displayed population, should their display be considered a matter at the Gallagher Gallery in Dublin’s Ely place this of good taste? If taste in portraiture is to be judged by week.”19 whether it offends sensibilities rather than on the merit of the artwork by aesthetic criteria, maybe opinion Thirdly, the exhibition did not have a prison theme. would weigh in favour of labelling such portraiture In the RHA show, the portrait of the prisoner, Brian, ‘tasteless’, or maybe not. This judgement would inevita- Portlaoise (no. 330), was juxtaposed with dignitaries bly involve some degree of viewer subjectivity. such as The Honourable Mr Ronan Keane, Chief Justice (no.397), His Eminence, Desmond Cardinal Connell, A comparison can be made between the eighteenth- and Archbishop (no. 393), and ex-politician, a bust of nineteenth-century establishment and today’s equivalent, Charles J. Haughey (no. 225). the dignitaries, politicians and businessmen who are honoured or who honour themselves by commissioning All these factors combined, it appears, led to the their portrait or portrait busts. The rise to high positions consensus of opinion of the section of the public who in society has, in some cases been controversial, and expressed their views, and of the media, that ‘appalling involved elements of white collar crime. The National bad taste’ was demonstrated by the exhibition of the Crime Forum Report, 1998 described white collar crime portrait. as a type of crime “wrongly perceived as victimless,” and continues, “its perpetrators are often well educated, well- ‘Good taste / bad taste’ – context and content off and privileged in the sense that they have ready access to the means to protect themselves from detection and What constitutes good taste or bad taste, and whose from punishment its perpetrators are often well educated, sensitivities are offended by ‘bad taste’? Taste in the well off and privileged, aren’t prosecuted.”20 These present context can be seen to be associated with the crimes, it adds, have necessitated one official tribunal after perception of the artist’s credentials and of the venue. another. Researcher Paul O’Mahony suggests that these The sitter’s identity was publicly judged to render the crimes “are so extensive that it is a real possibility that the portrait a tasteless exhibit in such a social context. illegal gains from ‘white collar crime’ far exceed the gain from the more acknowledged and feared areas of robbery, As already stated, there is no suggestion here of attempt- burglary, and larceny,” and that research has “adduced ing to diminish the severity of the prisoner’s crime. evidence, which suggests that the Irish courts may well However, because the unique combination of elements discriminate in favour of the socially more advantaged.”21 highlighted real issues that usually only partially surface, it is useful to use this case to explore the popular assump- Many people in today’s society may not find public tion that taste is a given and fixed entity and that sensitivi- homage in the form of portraiture to politically ties stem from a singular viewpoint. and economically successful personages particularly ‘sensitive’ and in good taste, if social context rather The arbitrary and subjective nature of what constitutes than aesthetic criteria prevails. good or bad taste can be highlighted by focusing on the social and political context of certain portraits. As mentioned, in the RHA exhibition itself there was Returning to the National Gallery: it contains an a portrait bust of ex-politician Charles J. Haughey. abundance of portraits of eighteenth-century landed Haughey is a figure who has been embroiled in gentry, the majority of whom would have acquired land controversy for decades, and has had a high profile through allegiance to the Crown, and subsequently at tribunals, where corruption of an extensive nature through inheritance. This occupation was effected by throughout the years of his leadership was revealed. the subjugation and dispossession of the native Irish

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 65 There was another portrait in the RHA exhibition 1Declan Fahy, Daily Mirror, 27 May, 2003, p. 7 which had the potential to offend the sensibilities of a 2Eamon Dillon, Artful dodgers, Sunday World, 26 May, 2003, certain section of the population. This was of Cardinal p. 13 3 Desmond Connell, who had also been involved in Jenny McQuaile, Portrait of Guerin killer stays, Star, 28 May 2003 controversy due to his role relating to the sexual abuse 4Mick O’Dea, personal communication of children by Catholic priests who were under his 5 supervision. It had emerged as a matter of fact that for McQuaile, op. cit.. 6 years the clergy, including Connell, had had reports of Aidan Dunne, Artscape, Irish Times, 31 May, 2003 7 the activities of this minority of offending priests, but Robert Witkin, Art and Ideology, in Art and Social Structure, Polity Press, 1995, p. 90 did very little to stop them, and never informed the 8Ryan , Art’s Meehan streak, Sunday World, 1 June, Gardaí. The victims of these offences have for years 2003, p. 14 been fighting for justice from Church authorities and 9Fahy, op. cit. for admissions of responsibility in the face of Church 10 quoted in Andrew Wilton, The Swagger portrait, Tate denials. It is possible that these victims, and members Gallery publications, London, 1992, p. 36 of the public who sympathise with their experiences, 11Dunne, op. cit. could have sensitivities regarding that particular exhibit, 12McQuaile, op. cit. maybe even seeing it as ‘grossly offensive’, an accusation 13Wilton, op. cit., p. 26 22 levelled at O’Dea’s portrait. 14Dunne, op. cit. 15 Brian Maguire, Tales from the Big House, Irish Arts Review, O’Dea did not demonise his subject. He shocked, not Winter 2003, p. 73 by setting out to shock, but by allowing a social pariah 16see also Katherine Thompson, New York: Brian Maguire, to symbolically join the ranks of citizens respected Bayview Project, CIRCA 103, Spring 2003, pp 84-86 by many people. Dunne observed, “When English 17Tubridy, op. cit. artist Marcus Harvey exhibited a giant portrait of the 18Fahy, op. cit., p. 7 convicted murderer Myra Hindley, composed of the 19Tubridy, op. cit. hand prints of children, it was calculated to shock…But 20National Crime Forum Report, 1998, p. 109 in O’Dea’s case, it is the identity of the anonymous- 21Paul O’Mahony, Crime and punishment in Ireland, 1993, looking sitter and, apparently, the sheer conventionality p. 234 of the image that caused controversy.”23 22Garda O’Carroll, in Fahy, op.cit 23Dunne, op. cit. Elizam Escobar has written, “good taste becomes 24Elizam Escobar, The Subversive Imagination, in The meaningless, merely a euphemistic code fashioned Heuristic power of Art, ed. Carol Becker, Routledge, New in order to impose an ideology, to prohibit and keep York / London, 1994, p. 45 25 in check any dissent or disruptive intentions.”24 In Ryan, op. cit. 26 the case of portraiture, the dominant cultural and Tubridy, op. cit. 27 economic forces have shaped the perceptions of an Dunne, op. cit. artform that is capable of myriad expressions. O’Dea’s 28Dunne, op. cit. “crime”25 is that he is seen to have disregarded the dominant, commonly accepted cultural conventions, giving rise to the irony that a painting that has been described variously as “ordinary,”26 one of “that most staid of painterly genres,”27 and displaying “sheer conventionality”28 has had the power to invoke such passions.

Maggie Deignan is co-ordinator and art tutor for the National College of Art and Design / Portlaoise art programme in Portlaoise prison. This article is part of an MA research thesis in the Faculty of Education, NCAD, 2004.

66 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 Carlow: The Institute of Potential, Art and Failure at Institute of Technology

Failure is an interesting concept with and the work running on parallel which to grapple in today’s success- lines. In a sort of Hollywood ‘high obsessed society. As if it were a concept’ move, over-arching ideas disease, there is the nagging anxiety are constructed, fleshed out with that it is a condition, which might references to philosophers, critical well be contagious. Set in opposi- theorists and to the work of other, tional terms: success is attractive and generally more famous, artists1, exciting, carrying with it the aura and the art in the exhibition itself of wealth, fame, love and happiness; seems only an excuse for the writing failure on the other hand is grubby, about it. Communism at Project lonely, mean, something to be (January 2005) was an example of hidden away from view. How then this. Curator Grant Watson wrote an to judge the success of an exhibition introduction to ideas, which fasci- about failure? nated, but which weren’t entirely manifest in the exhibition itself. Curating The Institute of Potential, Art and Failure, Nathalie Weadick With Art and Failure, the role of the selected four interesting (and works themselves seemed to be as successful) artists to contribute hooks on which to hang the curator’s work. She also wrote an equally (very interesting) ideas about success interesting curator’s statement and failure, a strategy which left / press release (rendered almost some individually strong pieces unreadable by some bizarrely preten- struggling for their own identity. tious graphic design). One of the In Brendan Earley’s Roundabout, ways in which relative success or a trestle table held a model for failure can be judged is by placing yet another future road system, something in relation to the half finished as if abandoned in a standards or goals it sets for itself. forgotten planner’s office. Four tiny Here, the lack of congruity between monitors were set around a rounda- what the curator had written about bout at one end, and an anonymous the exhibition and the work itself black car circled the roundabout, was the first intimation that the disappearing from one monitor to exhibition might explore failure in reappear in the next, all the while ways it had probably not anticipated. accompanied by the soothing swishing sound of tyres on tarmac. There is an increasing, and irritat- The tension between the technologi- ing, tendency in the visual arts (and cal sophistication of the monitor and also in theatre) for curators and sound system, and the rough raw publicists to be taken with an idea materials of the table and model and to develop it in a press release was finely held. Ideas of inevitabil- or curatorial statement, which ity, repetition, progress and stasis all will often bear little relation to the hovered around the work, and with work being exhibited or performed. Earley’s characteristic lightness of This is not a question of saying touch, lingered as haunting thoughts, something is brilliant when it isn’t leaving one wondering whether such (which of course takes place from inevitability is reassuring or unset- time to time), it is rather the curator tling. The piece itself was somewhat

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 67 lost in its placement, in the middle approach to viewing which was final twelve, a process of selection of an empty space between the main entirely apt to the space, where which is common to most artists, concourse of the Carlow Institute of students search into books for and certainly to all photographers. Technology and the library. Placing nuggets of knowledge, sometimes works in this busy space was always finding the deliciously unexpected Most in tune with the curatorial going to give rise to problems, but along the way. The slides demon- agenda, John Gerrard’s Slow fall takes Earley’s work seems just to have strated perfectly that sense of the a figure from the computer game been abandoned here. wonder which is to be found below Unreal tournament, and extends his the surface, and the unexpected death-fall from its original duration In terms of placement, Liam beauty which can lurk in things (approximately two seconds) to O’Callaghan’s microscopic slide- seldom seen or acknowledged. One twenty-two days (or the duration show of the minute detritus of life couldn’t help wondering (which of the exhibition where the piece (skin scrapings, scraps of food, hair, is probably unfair). However, how is sited). Twenty-two days is also fluff and dust), did much better. much better the installation would the period from the declaration of The delving beyond the surfaces have looked in one of those glorious war on Iraq to the fall of Baghdad,

Brendan Earley: Roundabout, 2005, installation shot (detail); courtesy Visualise, Carlow of the everyday which goes on in old wooden libraries full of leather when the war was officially declared a library made it the ideal site for tomes, illuminated by dusty shafts of over. The drawn-out death of the O’Callaghan’s jewel-like trove of light from ancient windows… Here, character has a poignancy which moments of discovery. Twelve slide the curator’s statement suggests is at odds with the medium and viewers were placed around the that the element of failure lies in form of the piece. An endlessly bookshelves at various heights and O’Callaghan’s rejection of eighty- dying soldier from a shoot-em-up sites, calling for a hide-and-seek eight slides in the selection of his game clad in futuristic armour,

68 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 which has failed to protect him, is re-presentation of the sign from the Gemma Tipton is a writer on art presented in the sanitised space of old Classic cinema at Harold’s Cross, and architecture, based in Dublin. the computer monitor where viewers Dublin, failed mainly because the She is editor of Contexts and of can manipulate the figure, to watch wall of the building was finished Space: Architecture for Art. him die from different angles. The with the wrong sort of plasterwork. failure of a war aimed at promoting It had been painted by McCann to The Institute of Potential, Art and peace, and the relationship of the be reflective, to show you the viewer Failure, Institute of Technology, individual death to the duration of looking back at yourself, as if on a Carlow, February 2005 the initial period of fighting makes cinema screen, with the abandoned a profound statement. Gerrard also sign from an old cinema behind 1This is a trick which also works well made a poster of the piece, which was you on the ground. Failure at your when reviewing visual art. sold in the students’ shop for a euro feet, so to speak. But the combina- each. This cleverly acknowledged the tion of plaster and paint didn’t specificity of the site, although how it come off, and “the high reflective referenced “contemporary art’s failure surface [which] refers to her concern

Niamh McCann, from The Institute of Potential, Art and Failure, 2005, installation shot (detail); courtesy Visualise, Carlow

in communicating effectively with with self-examination,” wasn’t. its audience” (from the Curator’s The curatorial statement goes onto statement), I’m not certain. explain that the piece is “referencing discussions” by Isamu Noguchi and Finally, facing you at the entrance R. Buckminster Fuller, but I, for one, to the concourse, Niamh McCann’s failed to find them here.

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 69 Derry: Jacqueline Salloum at Void Gallery

Jacqueline Salloum’s solo exhibi- invading American visions of Acting as a complete antithesis to tion is the second to take place Liberty. The film concludes with Planet of the Arabs is another film in Derry’s new contemporary art a quote from the book Reel Bad montage entitled Arabs a-go-go, space, Void. The exhibition features Arabs by Jack Shaleen, which which is a two-minute compilation a number of multimedia and film states“Out of 1000 films with of 1960s / 1970s Bollywood-style works. The first is a ten-minute Arab or Muslim characters 12 song-and-dance films from Arabic video montage called Planet of the were positive depictions, 30 were countries. The film offers a more Arabs which subjective view of Muslim culture is compiled and harks back to the innocence, from popular normality and naivety of another American era. action films, cut rapidly together, As you enter the main gallery space accompanied by you are introduced to a range of a heavy-metal popular-culture-based media, soundtrack. The which are used to communicate clips range from the artist’s Palestinian / Syrian- the blatant American heritage and beliefs. violence of There are number of high-colour- Chuck Norris contrast, graphic-style photo proceeding collages based around the artist’s to beat up his family portraits. The first of these Arab hosts after is entitled Partition, which is made insulting their up of manipulated family photos, food, to inter- cut out and placed at the centre of spersed images a large demonstration. Judging by drawn from visual clues such as background light enter- banners, the demonstration was tainment, organised in protest at the Israeli Jacqueline Salloum: Imee (my mother) born: Gaza, Palestine, such as Kenny 2003, 119 x 89 cm, ink jet print and frame, installation shot, partition of Palestine beginning Rogers and Void; courtesy Void in the late 1940s. Another of these some sheik images is called Imee (my mother) puppets on born Gaza, Palestine, which is a The Muppet Show. The film shows even handed and over 900 were 1960s / 1970s photo-portrait that us the range and constant stream of negative.” You are left wondering mixes pop-art aesthetics with the bias and propaganda that have infil- how deeply all these images are classical gilded frame of portrait trated mass media. When all the absorbed into our psyche, and to painting. Instead of the traditional footage is put together it delivers what extent they are ingrained landscape in the background, we a powerful message, highlighting within mainstream culture and see refugee tents stretching to society’s willingness to consume beliefs. The film-work carries the the horizon and soldiers curbing and accept these caricatured message, that without the impetus rioters. Again through small visual images of ‘us versus them’ without to discover the truth behind these and historical clues, it refers to her question. images we become hypnotised by mother’s generation and its experi- mass media into believing what is ence of living with the effects of the The film presents us with the right or wrong. British handover and creation of Western, comic-book-style Israeli territories. depiction of Muslims as maniacal terrorists or marauding savages A toy vending machine, normally

70 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 found in shopping centres, is Palestinian flag at its centre. Throughout the exhibition you appropriated by Salloum and are left in no doubt of Salloum’s entitled Palestinian refugees, The place of youth culture within political convictions, through her bringing to the fore previous refer- areas of conflict is explored through overtly political imagery and state- ences within the exhibition. What a film work-in-progress entitled ments. In Northern Ireland it is you get for your £2 is a plastic ball Sling shot hip hop which chronicles easy to draw parallels with the that separates to reveal a toy doll. the lives of Palestinian rappers Palestinian / Israeli struggle, but Included is a certificate stating living in Gaza, the West Bank and it is also important to maintain the name and origin of your doll, Israel. It documents their prepara- an open mind in discussing the much in the same manner as the tions for concerts and discussing many aspects to these problems. cabbage-patch dolls that were the subjects of their lyrics, which This exhibition offers a unique marketed in the 1980s. In the case and personal, of these plastic dolls, our expecta- insider’s tions of disposable entertainment perspective on are turned upside-down. The the effects of messages enclosed with the dolls a conflict, one go along the lines of “My name that seldom is Ali, I come from Haifa but in gets discussed 1948 all the houses and lands were or even seen stolen when 70,000 Palestinians in the West. like my family were evicted from Salloum offers their homes. I now live in Gaza, no easy answer in Rafah Camp.” Various other to a complex playful vehicles of communication situation but are used throughout the exhibi- brings into tion, but with obvious sinister context the undertones. Another such piece is many social Bazooka, which utilises wordplay upheavals of as the artist invites the audience which it is Jacqueline Salloum: Caterrorpillar, 2002, mixed media, 21 x 24 to take a seemingly innocuous cm; courtesy Void obviously the ‘Bazooka’ chewing gum from a cause. glass jar. Instead of the traditional ‘Bazooka’ comic inside we find a include police harassment, the John Mathews political cartoon mocking Israel’s separation wall on the West Bank, ability to negotiate over Palestinian and discrimination within housing Jacqueline Salloum: Samadoon, territories. This particular work is and educational policies. Void Gallery, Derry, March / April reminiscent of political-propaganda 2005 approaches of wartime 1940s. Corporate and governmental American intervention is also With another piece of work it is a major theme. Appache and difficult to discern if it is meant to Caterrorpillar are two exhibits, be ironic, a blatant recruitment- which display convincingly style cry to bear arms, or a feminist packaged, mock toys of ‘Apache’ statement. The large-scale photo- fighter helicopters and ‘Caterpillar’ montage Nehno Feda ‘Ayou (We are bulldozers; they carry health the homeland defenders) consists warnings like “Not Suitable for of a group of women wielding those concerned with human Kalashnikov rifles with a raised rights.”

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 71 Letterkenny: Caroline McCarthy: WindoWall

Caroline McCarthy: from WindoWall, 2005; courtesy the artist

When thinking of the passage scene; we create a mental picture. picture is a re-presentation of this through time, the terminology This picture is of course by its very interior, and as a re-presentation often used to designate the process nature intensely interior: created it is thus subject to distortion, through which one anticipates a in a mind, envisioned within an change, differing perceptions and moment is ‘to project’. We ‘project’ individual’s thoughts. Any descrip- the unpredictable particularities of ourselves into the future; we ‘see’ a tion or depiction of that mental individual perspectives. This exteri-

72 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 orisation of the interior ‘scene’ motion all of the above elements. subjects, designate one half of the is thus a complex process. Six large (366 x 244 cm) photo- imaginary circle to film in, and do graphs of interiors are mounted as not cross over into the other half.”1 There is, however, an apparent billboards onto the photographic WindoWall defies this convention: simplicity in the all-too-easily scenes’ exterior walls. For example, the presentation of the photographs considered duality of interior a photograph of an interior view of crosses the line and its imaging and exterior. The ‘window’ a student bedroom is mounted as displays this. In the photographs of is, I suppose, the primary a billboard onto the public exterior the interior spaces, left is now right, metaphor here; a window is wall of the bedroom. Through the clock faces and words and trade- an easy, simple device, which photographs, six interiors are made marks and posters are backwards. enables the exterior to have visible to their adjacent exteriors. The billboard photographs function access to a view of the interior: Through walls being modified so as to allow us vision through as a metaphor, it is unbeatable. – billboard sized photographs an unsanctioned window – an As a device, the window has of the interiors being mounted adjustment to the reality of the site. an ease of function to such a onto exterior walls – walls act as The particularities that this leads degree that as a metaphor it windows. to – such as ‘backwards’ images avoids complexities of issues of – are logically and intuitively left framing, of projection. And, I A distinct instance of time is unadjusted and uncorrected by suppose, a ‘wall’ is the window’s inscripted within each photo- McCarthy. obvious contrary, both as device graph, which will be visible over and as metaphor. As a device, a an extended period of time (the Finally, ‘window’ and ‘wall’ wall is a boundary, it delimits billboards will remain on site for six delineate public and private the visual field; as a metaphor it months). The images – as photo- spheres, and this public artwork is regarded as ideal inscription graphs – are static. Changes in light, does more than simply reverse these of a lack of connection, lack of changes in the positioning or use of categories: it exposes the vagaries of vision, lack of perception, lack objects featured in the images are such categories, of such processes of access. made static. Change, or the passage and their disavowals. of time, has been refuted. The WindoWall collapses these envisioning processes of ‘project- Declan Sheehan is Director of divisions: as an invented word ing’ a scene into the future are Context Galleries, Derry, and a it bonds the two words of disavowed. member of CIRCA’s Editorial ‘window’ and ‘wall’ linguis- Advisory Board. tically: they are no longer And particularities of the processes independent words, bur of imaging are made visible. The Caroline McCarthy: WindoWall, a rather mutually dependent, processes of imaging are full of public art project for Letterkenny, sharing the central letter which conventions and boundaries, each October 04 – ongoing completes one and begins with acts of delimiting. In cinema the other. As a metaphor, this (and cinema is surely where the 1www.dainter.com/infocus/crossin- invented word collapses the metaphor of image as ‘window on gline.htm metaphors of window and wall; the world’ reigns supreme) there Caroline McCarthy: from WindoWall, 2005; courtesy the artist they are no longer contraries is the device or convention of but rather mutually dependent. ‘crossing the line’ or the ‘180 degree The apparent contrary processes of rule’, which reinforces the illusion envisioning, and delimiting vision, of filmic space, the boundaries of are joined in one. filmic space, its own interior and exterior limits. The mechanism As a device, Caroline McCarthy’s or conceit is this: “The trick is to WindoWall public art project sets in draw an imaginary circle round the

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 73 Martin Shannon: Tainted, 2005, installation shot; courtesy ev+a

Limerick: ev+a

In his review for the Irish Times, a total of seventy-two) are exhibit- should in theory be easily accessed. Aidan Dunne notes that this year’s ing in just three venues: Limerick In fact, on my weekend visit to Open ev+a seems less widely City Gallery of Art, the old County Limerick, I was unable to gain entry dispersed than usual, suggesting Council Buildings on O’Connell to the Belltable because it is actually that curator Dan Cameron runs a Street, and the Belltable Arts Centre. closed all day Saturday and Sunday.1 particularly “tight ship.” The vast All three spaces are located within a As a consequence, my review majority of artists (fifty-seven out of few minutes’ walk of each other, so excludes discussion of a number of

74 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 works that I ev+a, between tourist and resident bureaucratic identity in the form had specifically constituencies. of fading signage. The majority of hoped to see. the former office spaces are used to In terms of its emphasis on inter- house several moving image works, Other elements personal exchange, Host also echoes linked by an emphasis on textual- of ev+a proved projects developed under the ity, and low-fi technology. These elusive for auspices of Young ev+a, such as the include Conor McFeely’s explora- different collection of stories told to Aileen tion of science-fiction conspiracy reasons. Nancy Lambert and Michael Fortune by and Karl Hunter’s unashamedly Hwang’s Host local children, and archived in a lowbrow homage to the Queen (2005), one of a DVD entitled The banshee lives in Mother, entitled The very thought of number of ‘off- the handball alley (2005).2 Although you (2004). This latter piece employs site’ projects, is recorded within the relatively crude animation to re-edit snippets marked on the mundane settings of primary-school of tabloid news, while in a neigh- official map at a classrooms and playgrounds, these bouring work Tim Elford develops site somewhere narratives produce a sense of place a less flippant exploration of news near Cathedral that is both strange and familiar. discourse, papering the walls with a Place. But there The mythical ‘handball alley’ is never catalogue of textual evidence entitled are no visible shown and instead is envisioned as The site of Iraqi resistance (2005). traces of an a site of imagination, constructed artwork at this from fragments of rumour, everyday Paul Rowley and David Philips also location because life and popular horror (most explore interconnections between Hwang’s notably the Candyman films). The conspiracy, archiving and low-fi project involves stories continually evolve before technology in Microfiche (2004), a relatively the camera, as the children borrow but their focus is historical. They intimate from their immediate surround- rework fragments of the news encounter ings to embellish their accounts of coverage generated by the 1974 between artist the banshee. In one final sequence, Russborough House robbery, raising and Limerick for example, a particularly accom- questions about the origins of the residents. plished storyteller glances around Byte Collection, and the status of During the for suitable props, before pointing fine art as a precious commodity. course of the out that the banshee appeared in a The decaying Georgian plasterwork exhibition, nearby field, combing her hair with provides an appropriate setting various guests fingernails “as long as crayons.” for Microfiche, and also forms (a total of about the raw material of Chris Sauter’s ten in all) are Like Hwang, and Lambert and ambitious installation project, The stepping out Fortune, Martin Shannon plays with nature of culture (2005). Almost of their usual questions of visibility and address in hidden behind a blandly functional routine to stay Tainted, an ostensibly promotional reception desk, Sauter’s piece inverts with Hwang in billboard located on Bridge Street. the usual hierarchy of structure an apartment on Cathedral Place. When viewed from a distance, this and ornament. Using elements that Nothing is demanded in exchange advertisement for a “dynamic, educa- have been precisely and decora- for this hospitality but Hwang hopes tional economic social and recrea- tively excised from the surrounding that guests may offer her some tional base” is revealed as the carrier plasterboard walls, he produces a insight into the city from a local of a hidden, but all too familiar, freestanding sculpture – a kind of perspective. For many, this perform- message – a less than flattering miniature architectural ‘folly’. ance of hospitality will recall various colloquial name for the city. Printed international models of ‘relational’ text is also a feature of several Mark Cullen’s Cosmic annihilator art practice, but Host seems produc- works at the old County Council (2005) also plays with scale, inviting tively attuned to a certain tension buildings and of the site itself, the viewer into a disorienting particular to an exhibition such as which retains remnants of its earlier darkened space before revealing a

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 75 miniature glass world that suggests play in Aoife Collins’ assemblages of videos by Michel Gondry, staging a plan for an imaginary city or a petals, feathers and other colourful a never-ending journey in which a fragment of a sci-fi film set. Siobhán fragments and, elsewhere on the distant object remains stubbornly, Tattan’s slide / sound installation, ground floor, recur in Susan Gogan’s and disturbingly, in the centre of the entitled The play: a meeting of the slick photographic homage to the frame. Niamh O’Malley’s Vignette storytellers, the raconteur and the zombie film. (2005), incorporating a projection of seanchaí (2005), is equally theatrical a moving image onto a painting of but arguably more self-reflexive in The City Gallery also houses a the same scene, evokes art-histori- its exploration of spectatorship. The number of video installations cal rather than pop-cultural refer- work solicits the viewer’s partici- upstairs, presented as projections. ences. The stillness of the foreground pation in an unfolding narrative The most ambitious is RVB (2005), objects (a collection of potted plants complete with props and script and, a lengthy three-screen installation on a window sill) is continually while it may lack the sophistication by Ann Cleary and Dennis Connolly disturbed by the play of light and and seduction of James Coleman’s that takes up the play with innocence shadow on the glass and transparent slide installations, it evokes a and darkness evident in other curtains. This generates a confusion somewhat similar sense of unease. works. RVB documents a three-year of spatial and temporal registers, period in the lives of the couple’s which persists long after the The exhibition at the Limerick twin daughters and a timeline for projected image has faded to white City Gallery is less cohesive overall, this work, indicating key events and the ‘trick’ has been revealed. but some points of correspond- such as the children’s birthdays, the ence do exist between specific traumatic experiences of neighbours Open ev+a 2005 clearly does not works sited on the ground floor. and the activities of two exotic birds, have the pronounced interna- Andreas Gefeller’s photographs can be found at the entrance to tional address that characterises of domestic interiors are simul- the installation space. The timeline the biennial ‘invited’ counterpart. reinforces the Nonetheless, the organisers have project’s epic been keen to stress its international scale and also dimension, with press releases adver-

Chris Sauter: The nature of culture, 2005, installation shot; + + Aoife Collins: installation shot, ev a, 2005, installation shot; courtesy ev a courtesy ev+a taneously utilitarian and utopian, functions as a point of orientation tising work from eight countries. suggesting architectural models, within the narrative for any prospec- The brochure also clearly addresses children’s toys or even surveillance tive viewer. Other moving-image an international audience, incor- imagery. Kukuli Velarde’s installa- works in the City Gallery are more porating a map of Ireland and a tion of ceramic figures and Chad directly concerned with the formal list of airline websites. But the ev+a McCall’s instructional drawings qualities of projection and the website, the most obvious means are similarly open to interpreta- tension between the still and moving through to develop this address tion, and are equally charming and image. Guy Hundere’s Impasse to a wider audience, has not been disturbing. These factors remain in (2001) pre-empts recent music used very effectively.3 The commit-

76 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 ment and enthusiasm of all those associated with ev+a is evident and these problems may be due to scarce resources, or the prioritisa- tion of other modes of commu- nication. These issues will need to be confronted, however, if ev+a seeks to fully engage with all of its potential audiences and retain its status as “Ireland’s pre-eminent annual exhibition of contemporary art.”

Maeve Connolly lectures in film and visual culture at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. ev+a 2005, Limerick, March Susan Gogan: Untitled, 2005; courtesy ev+a – May 2005

1According to the organisers of ev+a, the Belltable Art Centre was chosen specifi- cally because it is also open during nighttime performances (approximately 20 per month) and therefore offers access to the exhibition at times when other venues are closed. This is all very well, but no details of these evening open hours were listed on the exhibi- tion brochure, or available at the other venues. 2The banshee lives in the handball alley is being screened continuously at Limerick City Library and is also available to buy on DVD from the Limerick City Arts Office. 3I first consulted the website shortly after the opening of exhibition, on 12 March and was unable to download the map or get full details of opening times. My concerns were passed on to the press office, and this problem has now been Niamh O’Malley: Vignette, 2005, installation shot; courtesy ev+a resolved.

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 77 Clonmel: Ann Mulrooney and Ciara Healy at South Tipperary Arts Centre

“More often than not it is the tions as an imperial mindset, and displaced person who attempts to Mulrooney’s interest in the psychol- make tangible what is missing and ogy of identity through ornament. absent.” The collaboration was born out Replica explores displacement and of chance; neither one had known perceptions of it; the show brings of the other. After a few words in together an amalgam of views on NCAD’s library, the two endeavored the topic. Through a collaborative to merge, conceptually speaking. With process, Ann Mulrooney and Ciara no preconceived plan, they started a Healy have linked thinking by the dialogue between London and Dublin magpie means of collecting quotes via snail mail, resulting in Replica at (like the above), books of reference, the South Tipperary Arts Center. and domestic-iconic items which At the Arts Centre, there is a crude, plywood, open-top box / room butted between two pillars, creating a space within the gallery. One enters through a cut-out doorway into a rectan- gular stage-set symmetrically balanced with domestic items – a cathedral- like throw back to your great- grandaunt’s parlor.

A Bible-like Ann Mulrooney and Ciara Healy: Replica (detail), 2005, installation shot; courtesy the artists album of correspond- relate to what is at the core of cultural ence takes center stage on an MDF / identity. Over a period of one year the wood-effect, pedestal occasional table. two exchanged letters; these became Curiosity could provide the impulse visual exchanges using drawings / to open it, but although its contents photomontages in an attempt to played a central role throughout the capture their own personal interests. collaboration, it is now secondary and Their conceptual concerns are similar: merely verifies the process. Behind Healy’s interest in institutional collec- this there is a shabby, green-velvet,

78 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 two-seater Chesterfield sofa – harking The walls are faux-paneled to dado back to old imperialism. The sagging height with wood-stained MDF, above sofa represents a sentimental beauty which the they are papered with flock that is lost through usage; it replicates in a raised-velvet, bamboo design; this loss. again there is the reference to travel, particularly in a colonial context; There are wall-hung trophies in wallpaper that is both aspirational heavy black frames, one by Healy and a trophy of grandeur. of miniature cut-out butterflies, skewered by pins, navigating their One could enter, look and leave. way on a pencil-drawn map of the Better to stop, sit and take a reprieve world. Cut from wrappings of food from life. Then you can glean a bought at Healy’s local Polish deli, memory, be it of your granny’s ‘good these flightless creatures symbolize room’ or of your family history, and paths of human migration. There are two identical glass cabinets with internal lights backed up against opposite walls. Each cabinet displays an array of found objects (sourced locally): ornaments, books of reference relating symbolically to the contents within the room – books such as Butterflies, The Culture of Collecting and Postcolonalism illus- trate the process of thinking resulting in this installation. There is silverware tampered with (by Healy) through the engraving of random quotations –-for example, “Since it was not home, Strangeness made sense.” Random quotes, it may appear, Ann Mulrooney and Ciara Healy: Replica (detail), 2005, installa- but thought-provoking, albeit, tion shot; courtesy the artists in this www age, because of their domesticity only for a short while. Placemats and porcelain chihuaha delve into many levels of contempla- dogs, encased by Mulrooney, are tion, be they political, social and or trophies / symbols of colonialism, economic; it’s all open to interpreta- but there is no boar’s head adorning tion. the walls in true reading-room fashion. The act of collecting books Pauline O’Connell is an artist living and dead animals for display was in Kilkenny altogether a male pursuit, a display of wealth, travels and education. The Ann Mulrooney and Ciara exhibition’s reading is not female Healy: Replica, South Tipperary Arts nor aggressively male; it elicits subtle Centre, Clonmel, May 2005 gender participation.

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 79 Herzliya: The Belfast Way at Herzliya Museum of Art

Aisling O’Beirn: Samson and Goliath, card model , 2005; courtesy the artist

Israel is the perfect site for an exhibi- to this group show of ten artists of Israel, is its installation. A video tion of work from Northern Ireland. from Belfast. Green Line Sisyphus, tracking a car journey and hike Like the North, the more you see an eighteen-minute video loop through the Israeli landscape shows of it, the less you understand. The of the artist climbing around and the limitations of documentary, but complexities and paradoxes are around a hunk of desert rock, is a being forced to climb a precarious set just as fierce and the young armed succinct metaphor for the repeti- of wooden steps bolted to scaffolding soldiers on the streets and bag tive, durational struggle that is the to view the small monitor near the checks at every shop and café are Middle East. Tightly framed, the ceiling is a touch of genius. You at eerily familiar if you’re from the rock appears brainlike, implac- once undergo the vertiginous effect North. However, roadblocks and able – as stuck as the many minds of being in Israel and the physical strip searches are not part of daily that have strived to find a solution. sensation of an observation tower. life for the wealthy inhabitants of Wonderfully experiential, Shipsides Herzliya, a beach town north of Tel knows to dodge a moral standpoint. Seamus Harahan handles documen- Aviv. I suspect Dan Shipsides’ work The strongest element of his other tary truths by adeptly side-stepping is the most accessible to visitors work, Temporary viewpoint, topology conventions in his superbly

80 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 layered visual poem, Holylands. There are no cars or people, as if MacWilliam’s Kuda bux and fare Unfortunately the accompanying text sectarianism has won, the walls have less well. In each case, the installa- does not explain that this Holyland worked – everyone has gone home. tion obscures rather than develops is a ladder of streets off the Ormeau Except the artist, who is paralysed. an intriguing story about a heroic, Road named after Jerusalem, Claustrophobic, insistent, it stresses historical figure. Although Aisling Damascus and Palestine. Harahan’s that concrete can’t construct peace. O’Beirn’s series of cardboard style is casual. He selects seemingly maquettes of Belfast’s sectarian, arbitrary shots of local drunks, graffiti, an empty milk carton being blown down the street, a helicopter in the sodium-lit sky, a lace-curtained window. The images are often jumpcut to a sampled sound- track of civil rights’ speeches, classical music, postpunk, Springsteen, slowed-down hip-hop, blues and Irish ballads. He uses the camera like a breeze, caressing a Miriam de Búrca: Go home, 2003, video still, Super-8 transferred to video with sound; courtesy the artist pink flower, then the pale bare chest of a teenage boy playing in the gush Mary McIntyre’s photographs of architectural peculiarities also needs of a burst water main. It’s sad but night-time landscapes also under- text to outline their significance, never soppy, delicate but not slight stands the subtle nuances of menace. they have a compact, compelling – a tender, curious surveillance to Apparently bucolic, these tree-lined presence. Like Harahan, she invents a redeem all the brutal watching this paths are lit by streetlamps under visual language rather than reiterate community has suffered. No-one is a murky, urban sky, giving them a the over-determined images used to asked to give their opinion, to justify vaguely forensic shiver. McIntyre lets represent the North. or explain, and this is a sweet relief. the context hover at the edges rather than consume the image: these are Cherry Smyth is a writer and curator Go home, Miriam de Búrca’s video, the leafy shortcuts we have learnt not based in London. is as potent here as it is in Ireland. to take. The short piece cuts between two Herzliya: The Belfast Way: Young shots of empty roads along the Peace Some works rely heavily on textual Art From Northern Ireland, Herzliya Wall to the steady beat of a drum. backup, such as Moira McIver’s Museum of Art, March –-May 2005 Anxious choice drives the narrative. Portrait, diary, biography and Susan

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 81 Dublin: Isabel Nolan at Project

And so it stays just on the edge occupy the mind at night. Like Larkin, shapes have a repeated circular motif, of vision Nolan attempts to interpret how these others are more angular. In the centre A small unfocused blur, a presences morph and change, grow of the gallery, two mahogany tables standing chill.1 bright and disappear in order to be felt present a series of portraits of sleeping and understood. faces and another collection of night- In his poem Aubade, Philip Larkin time shapes. reflects upon the impending inevitabil- One of the seven artists from the Torn from a notebook, these drawings are placed under heavy sheets of glass. They seem to be floating over the dark table top and have an abandoned, spontaneous beauty. Also on the table, a small silver screen plays a short DVD entitled Quiet please, in which most of the drawings on show are animated into a short film. This film begins with a sequence Isabel Nolan: Sleeping dog, 2004, pencil on paper, 21 x 29.5cm; courtesy the artist of sleeping portraits and shape drawings. ity of death in the lonely darkness of Republic of Ireland selected for this The images are occasionally inter- night. He describes the moving shapes year’s Venice Biennale, Nolan’s work rupted with fragments of handwrit- that haunt the corners of his vision. is primarily concerned with forms of ten text which refer to night-time As daylight slowly strengthens, his representation and addresses the diffi- thoughts. The thoughts shift from bedroom returns to its normal shape culty of attaching meaning to experi- simple descriptions – “These presences and the presences of the previous night ence. In this exhibition, drawing is the vary in size, but are never very big” seem strange and out of place. main discipline through which she –-to more intimate personal reflections expresses her experiences of the night. –-“How could you know what or who Everything I said let me explain Along the gallery wall, which was you are?” is the title of Isabel Nolan’s recent painted a light grey in order to soften exhibition at the , the sterilised white, small drawings and As the text grows increasingly reflec- Dublin. The show is a visual explora- paintings explore the shifting shapes of tive, the night-time shapes begin to tion of the thoughts and shapes that the night-time presence. Many of these multiply, becoming larger on the

82 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 screen, filling it completely before receding back into pulsating circles of orange, red and green. Flickering and shimmering, they are the colours seen when you close your eyes.

The tenderness Nolan expresses towards her slumbering subjects is almost palpable in her delicate Sleep sequence drawings, most especially in Sleeping dog. Whilst the exhibi- tion offers many glimpses of intimate narratives, it simultaneously uses tools to prevent the viewer from fully absorbing them. The glass upon the table top or the newsprint that covers the text in Available ensures that elements of Nolan’s night-time experi- ences remain private, almost contra- dictory.

This contradiction, between the physical intimacy of lying next to someone and the sense of distance experienced when they sleep, is prevalent in the show. Nolan has created a strong visual metaphor for the unaccountable phenomenon that separates two people, even as they lie side by side. Her drawings are an expression of the difference between distance and proximity, sleep and consciousness. Isabel Nolan: Sleeping dog, 2004, pencil on paper, 21 x 29.5cm; courtesy the artist

Ciara Healy is an artist and writer based at Pallas Studios; she is currently completing her Ph.D. in Irish curato- rial policy at Dublin Institute of Technology.

Isabel Nolan: Everything I said let me explain, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, March – May 2005

1Larkin, Philip, ‘Aubade’ Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, Faber and Faber 2003

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 83 Dublin: Madeleine Moore at Pallas Heights

Madeleine Moore: Ghost station, oil on linen, 42 x 50 cm; courtesy the artist

Sean Tracy House is a haunted place; looking about, one soon notices the spirited features of this new ‘moral and the spirits are communing encroaching dereliction which belies landscape’ hardly have the strength on the top floor, just beyond the this ‘rhetoric of purity’. If it is purity to support themselves, and hang washing. One’s entry is by appoint- we desire, we might only find it in loosely and enigmatically in a void, ment only, so already we suspect the the ideal geometries, architectural isolated from each other and divided spirits might not speak to all. dream images and absent popula- by the blankness of what should tions redoubled in Moore’s cool unite them. Once inside, we are presented with paintings. an austere modern interior, newly The second, Ghost station, decorated in white: a suitable place The first takes its departure from remembers those deserted U-bahn from which to begin again on the Le Corbusier’s Pavilion de l’Esprit stations of East Berlin that one other side, so to speak, of what has Nouveau of 1925. In monochrome might occasionally travel through gone before. “By law, all buildings it traces an L-shaped structure, between West Berlin stations. Here, should be white”; so said an earlier set along the essentialist horizon- behind the curtain, dimly lit and avatar of l’esprit nouveau, but, tal / vertical axis. But the white- heavily guarded, disembodied spirits

84 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 jostle each other gently along a corridor. That these bodies might have transcended themselves and become full of rational light was once the hope, but in the ‘stations at which the trains do not stop’ one saw only shadows.

An open- plan, uniform interior is laid out in Office. Madeleine Moore: Black hut, oil on linen, 45 x 50 cm; courtesy the artist As a place of work, it was to be simple but It is rather uncanny, then, that also But still, something is being gained: elegant and practical, developing within these wildernesses the most building continues, boldly facing a ‘organically’ in connection with its deleterious form of exclusion and future in which it sees its present site and its occupants’ needs. Here uneven accumulation, the private triumph repeated. One need only again, disembodied spirits move ownership of land, reaches its look out the downstairs window about, but this time they meet with margins: and where, by virtue of south to the Wicklow Mountains monumental structures beyond their basic necessity and the nearness of across a skyline of cranes to notice authority. Although the notion of death some vestigial community a quite different ‘new spirit’; a organic movement might hold great continues. neo-liberal project made up in potential for architectural develop- equal parts of ‘modernisation’ and ment, combining the latter with What have we lost that makes us historical amnesia. Against this nature, here that development ‘takes wander around the wilderness like background, the need not simply flight’ without those who built it. ghosts, full of ‘infinite longing’? to maintain an alternative modern From the modernist project of a spirit but to give body again to its Moving upstairs into the thickest community to come there emerges revolutionary moments seems ever darkness requires a leap of faith, as the same spectre as from the renova- more acute. the breadth of vision downstairs tion of a once-whole community in turns inward to the isolation of a the past: a community can equally Tim Stott is a critic based in Dublin. black hut, like those bothies in the be ‘lost’ in the future. But how could wilderness providing refuge from we lose something which never took Madeleine Moore, The New Spirit, storms. A single spotlight draws us place? And if nothing is lost, nothing January –-February, 2005, Pallas to the painting like moths, playing is to be regained: so, perhaps we Heights, Dublin out that reflex of private withdrawal should look for community amidst so antithetical to the modernist the present ruins. vision.

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 85 Dublin: Mark Manders at Irish Museum of Modern Art

Mark Manders: Parallel occurrence, 2001, painted wood and table with aluminium fox, iron chain, locks, keys, rope, aluminium letter, iron block and artist-made newspapers, dimensions variable; courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago, restricted gift of the Buddy Taub Foundation / Irish Museum of Modern Art

Among the attractions offered to or elaborate enclosure. While the gradually transformed over a decade visitors to the 2001 Venice Biennale grandfather of this particular genre, into a ghostly grey cavern replete with was the opportunity to compare and at least in recent times, is probably fake walls, blind corridors, blocked contrast the work of three young Ilya Kabakov, all three of these very up windows and dread-inducing pits. artists from three different countries different artists were actually in their Over on the island of Giudecca one who had come to international thirties at the time. The German could find Mike Nelson’s installation prominence over the previous few pavilion presented a reconstituted The Deliverance and the Patience, years, all of whom have produced version of Gregor Schneider’s Dead sponsored by the British foundation large-scale installations marked by House Ur, the creepily customised Peer Trust. This was a vast, disorient- a macabre, uncanny or melancholic family home in the small German ing labyrinth of musty corridors, sense of compromised domesticity town of Rheydt, which Schneider had salvaged doors and battered bric-à-

86 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 brac, which invited the viewer to take tion, Parallel occurrence‚ (2001). This include the sombre, muted palette several complementary if confusing work introduced another recurring in which black, brown and grey journeys through fictive worlds of the element in Manders’ lexicon of forms, predominate, the displaced emphasis artist’s devising. Meanwhile, in the sculpted animals: in this instance on the self, the preponderance of Palazzo Ca‚ Zenobio, Post-Nature, a fox, made of painted aluminium, vessels, containers and enclosures, a group show of nine contempo- suspended upside-down by a chain and a fascination with obscure rary Dutch artists, included Mark from a painted wood closet and numerological systems (the mysteries Manders, one of whose signal works carrying in its mouth a sealed of inherent scale and the oddness is a project he refers to as Self-portrait aluminium envelope. While Manders of scalar distortion and discrepancy as a building, an ongoing, life- has conjured up quite a menagerie are addressed in a whole series of consuming project he began in 1986 over the years, including various works, which ostensibly reduce pre- at the age of eighteen. dogs, cats, rats and mice, human existing forms to 88% of their proper beings also appear in the work, size). This lineage certainly includes The earliest work included in generally in dismembered, distorted Joseph Beuys, though unexpected Manders’ recent show at IMMA or stylised forms, sometimes parallels with Arte Povera, in particu- was a seminal work from that same reminiscent of Etruscan clay figures. lar with the figure of Mario Merz, year. Inhabited for a survey (1986) is In Isolated bathroom (2003) three suggest themselves at times. The an assortment of writing materials, armless supine figures in painted works’ atmosphere of melancholy erasers, scissors and painting aluminium and ceramic, covered in and obsessiveness, and its sense of materials laid out end to end in the plastic sheeting, reclined in identical cruelty mitigated by dark humour, shape of a rudimentary floor plan poses and wigs near a large iron is not unprecedented in the art that for a building in which two large bathtub with a fully functioning has emanated from the Netherlands rotundae are joined by a corridor off wooden tap. In a small connect- and Belgium in recent times, though which there are a series of smaller ing space between the two rooms it is perhaps more marked in the rooms. This work constitutes the First containing the aforementioned works latter. The grammar of Manders’ floorplan for self-portrait as a building. was a dense wall of stacked newspa- art is, however, ultimately a private A distinct continuity in Manders’ pers, courtesy of The Irish Times. language to which the viewer is concerns over the past decade is This served, among other things, to provided only limited access – much evident from Small isolated room highlight Manders’ abiding interest as the protective wires with which (2004), one of the most recent works in the printed word and image, as some of the more delicate sculp- in the show, which also included evidenced by his numerous artist’s tures were unfortunately but quite elements suggesting a floorplan, books and broadsheets. understandably cordoned off kept delineated once again by a series of the viewer at arm’s length from pens and other related materials. In Parallel Occurrence was Manders’ these fascinating examples, at once this case, however, the floorplan was second solo show in Ireland following beguiling and disturbing, of what the conjoined with a second element, a an earlier outing at the Douglas Hyde artist himself has described as “still pitch-black, irregular ceramic form Gallery back in the summer of 1997. lives with broken moments.” open at one end which managed Despite the comparisons suggested simultaneously to look like a above with other artists of his genera- Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith is a scorched landscape and a sawn-off, tion, Manders generally gives the critic, curator and Senior Lecturer in charred torso from which a number impression of being very much a Modern Irish at University College of spindly trees and two tall chimneys loner, intent on giving sculptural Dublin. incongruously sprouted. These two form to the stunted narratives and works were separated by a number of obscure symbols of a deeply private, Mark Manders: Parallel Occurrence‚ interconnecting rooms, each of which even dreamlike interior life. Various Irish Museum of Modern Art, contained substantial sculptural aspects of his work nevertheless Dublin, March – May 2005 tableaux from the past five years, suggest a quite particular continental including the title piece of the exhibi- European sculptural lineage. These

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 87 Belfast: Cahal McLaughlin at Catalyst

Controversy surrounded the Maze and its ‘political prisoners’ when it was open, so an exhibition consist- ing of three video documentaries filmed at the now rapidly decomposing site of the prison, and featuring Republican Gerry Kelly, Loyalist Billy Hutchinson and ex-warder Desi Waterworth could hardly be anything but.

Each video is in a separately partitioned space within the gallery, echoing the preferred segregation of Loyalist, Republican and staff at the prison itself – as the gallery was specially configured for the show one could question whether or not this was a deliberate reinforcement of their political separatism. The films are shakily shot, seem barely edited, and with all three blaring at once, extremely difficult to actually hear – although apparently the gallery are trying to sort out the sound balance problems.

In the era of reality TV, what struck me most was the docu-soap quality of the films, the format somewhat like that of The Naked Chef, with questions being asked from behind camera, jerky camera angles, and with an obviously set-up series of observations.

Each of the three participants shares a different version of the past, and it is trying to piece together a version of the truth from the omissions, the unsaid as much as the said, from the narratives, that makes this piece worth- while and makes it not just another party-political broadcast, albeit in a different venue from the usual.

Gerry Kelly, with his perma-tan and a suit, looks the most natural tourguide, glossing over the violence both inside and outside of the prison, and telling a story of victorious struggle over the system resulting in an army of now-educated men, strengthened not weakened by their internment. Billy Hutchinson takes a different route, casually dressed, shoulders stooped, telling us that it was courtesy of the cruelty of the system that he “came in a boy and went out a man.”

An unsmiling Desi Waterworth is almost cartoon-like in his role of hard-man ex-warden, stating without a hint of irony, “I’m a bad bastard,” and only cheering Top to bottom above: Cahal McLaughlin: Inside Stories (Memories from the Maze and Long Kesh Prison), video still; up when describing the methods of intimidation, courtesy Catalyst Arts(top: Billy Hutchinson, bottom Desi or should that be security, such as ‘stargazing’, the Waterworth) meaning of which he goes into in great detail, should

88 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 you really wish to know. The most interesting part of Waterworth’s monologue, in the context of these videos as art at least, are his reminiscences around the dirty protests, where he describes the artistic inclina- tions of some of the inmates who covered their walls in pictures. It says something to the longevity of art that this memory prevails.

I’m not sure what Cahal McLaughlin intended to do when he directed these pieces, although apparently they will end up as part of a series regarding place and memory at the Imperial War Museum. McLaughlin is a documentary maker (and academic) by profes- sion, and had this been properly edited it would have made a good one, but in trying to make it an artwork these videos appear in limbo as something in between art and documentary. It could be said that it is within this very limbo that the work exists – the space where the viewer experiences history being rewritten, and it is not to say that they aren’t worth watching – it’s always worth watching people attempting to re-write history. There are also moments of unexpected humour (intentional or otherwise), such as when Hutchinson describes the Loyalists’ love of birds: “crazed killers but we always looked after the birds.”

It’s rare for a gallery to get as much press coverage for an exhibition as this one has had, but then it’s also rare for a gallery to choose to exhibit the work of an academic over the work of an artist. The Maze always was the focus of controversy, and by choosing to Top and bottom above: Cahal McLaughlin: Inside Stories (Memories from the Maze and Long Kesh Prison), video still; exhibit McLaughlin’s work Catalyst has ensured that courtesy Catalyst Arts(bottom Gerry Kelly) the spirit of controversy survived, even if the prison didn’t.

Sarah McAvera is a free-lance writer and arts adminis- trator currently working for the Golden Thread Gallery.

Cahal McLaughlin, Inside Stories (Memories from the Maze and Long Kesh Prison), Catalyst Arts, Belfast, April / May 2005

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 89 London: Mairéad McClean at University of Greenwich

Mairéad McClean: State of Mind, 2005, installation shot; courtesy the artist

Mairéad McClean’s State of Mind was was being remembered was unclear, showed its film against the uneven, installed, somewhat prosaically, in perhaps childhood memories evoked stained walls. One watched a flickering the Stephen Lawrence Gallery of the by the inclusion of fragments of Super- figure emerge from darkness, a young University of Greenwich, and rather 8 footage, or an absence pointed to by woman playing an accordion, walking more enigmatically, and to greater the girl’s continual looking out of the down a dark, tree-lined lane. With effect, in a crypt in another part of that window. the camera’s constant movement and institution’s buildings. In the Lawrence the crepuscular tone of both film and Gallery an intelligent arrangement of To see the other film one had to make milieu, one was reminded of some of two screens at right angles, one back- special arrangements with the gallery’s Stan Brakhage’s 1950s work, especially projected, the other thrown onto the curator, who unlocked the gate to a Anticipation of the night. screen, showed a young woman sitting space beneath the imposing architec- in a rocking chair, humming again and ture of the former Royal Naval College. McClean’s films clearly dwelt upon again the same bars of a half-familiar This crypt – with a wonderful vaulted ideas of memory and reverie, but the tune that one nonetheless couldn’t roof – is one of the original Tudor ‘secrecy’ and locked-away character of place. The rocking movement of the structures from the site, mostly demol- the one in the crypt suggested to me chair was mirrored in a clever editing ished or built over, and seemed almost a particular approach to the subject, pattern so that the two screens were to be a secret enclosure within the one rooted in ideas of psychoanalysis. sometimes synchronised, at others college. The curator was also required Having to wait upon a curator – it working in contradiction. What to turn on the 16mm projector which was a requirement of the college that

90 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 Mairéad McClean: State of Mind, 2005, installation shot; courtesy the artist the crypt was always otherwise kept authorities seemed to have forgotten. a similar sense of finding ‘poetic’ ways locked – to grant special access to the Screened onto its walls State of Mind #2 to utter the unutterable in McClean’s work recalled a project by the German suggested the running in, or projection films: the film unwinding on the artist Angela Grauerholz in the early onto, the unconscious of a memory one projector’s spools, the mottled surface 1990s. Grauerholz’s photographs – like didn’t know one had, or recollect what of projection. Something vital was McClean’s films connected to memory its source was. This necessarily invoked coming to the surface, emerging for and to Freudian thought – were kept the theories of ‘cryptology’ arrived at by interpretation, but neither the work, as wrapped in tissue, locked in a specially the French analysts Nicholas Abraham analysand, nor we, as its analysts, could made steel cabinet, and could only and Maria Torok to account for those be wholly certain of its meaning. be accessed at certain times of the anamnesiac traces in the unconscious week, when a white-gloved ‘expert’ of experiences the subject didn’t have, Chris Townsend is Senior Lecturer in would open these secret memories and or in which the subject built ‘crypts’ to the Department of Media Arts, Royal ‘explain’ them in a parody of analytic contain the unutterable trauma that Holloway, University of London. interpretation. was the point of analysis. That encryp- tion is achieved both by encoding and Mairéad McClean: State of Mind, State of Mind was altogether more entombing, as Jacques Derrida points University of Greenwich, April / May down and dirty than that, both in out in his introduction to Abraham and 2005 its use of a cranky, obsolete technol- Torok’s masterly retrospective analysis ogy (16mm film) and a damp, dark, of Freud’s texts on ‘the Wolf Man’, and obsolete space that even the college it surfaces in forms of poesis. You got

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 91 Limerick: Mark O’Kelly (and Sarah Pierce) at Limerick City Gallery of Art

Mark O’Kelly has departed South Gallery. the coloured manila folders and somewhat from the standard arranged scatterings of documents Painting Exhibition formula to It is a well held secret that the on a side table. The privileged include, in his current show at visitor may make an appointment inspector of this information gains Limerick City Gallery of Art, the with the gallery staff to enter the not only an intimate insight into

Mark O’Kelly and Sarah Pierce: Caged archive, 2005; courtesy Kevin Kavanagh Gallery installation Caged archive, a work cage and enjoy a supervised browse an aspect of the artist’s practice designed in collaboration with the through the carefully archived normally withheld from public artist, Sarah Pierce. Caged archive material. Once admitted, a white- view, but also a chance to play is a selection of O’Kelly’s research gloved handler will respectfully detective, absorbing clues that allow neatly housed in a padlocked metal guide the guest over the ordered one to trace the creation of some cage sited amid his paintings in the contents of the perspex boxes, of the exhibited paintings back to

92 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 their tangible points of origin. Such embarrass the collection, no ragged histories. O’Kelly’s interest in investigation exposes energetic newspaper edges betray a hasty the mechanisms underlying how rivalry between images competing decision. Each fragment has been and what we perceive, and in the for final selection to appear on treated with museum reverence, systems and patterns governing canvas, and some of the artist’s each printed fossil painstakingly these selections, is embedded in his aesthetic scruples in the primitive preserved. research and articulated to a wider design stages. For example, sifting audience through his paintings. through this history reveals that But Caged archive is also a Considered together with Archive, several pages these works of chairs draw attention auditioned to the inevi- for the part of table subject the Chair in at the heart of the painting, information Table and chair management (2001) and a and manipula- back catalogue tion. of catwalk models vied for Stepping the painter’s outside the attention cage, enriched before Yohji (and, indeed, and Cristobel perhaps slightly strutted onto smug) with canvas. one’s private discover- Through ies, the act of Caged archive, looking at the O’Kelly and paintings that Pierce present constitute the archiving as larger part of a fine art. this exhibition The scraps is underwritten and cuttings, by little revela- cartoons and tions which sketches are unlock new organised understandings and filed of the works’ with librarian construction. precision. Dates are faith- Ciara Finnegan fully recorded, is an artist making it based in Mark O’Kelly and Sarah Pierce: Caged archive, 2005; courtesy Kevin Kavanagh Gallery possible Mark O’Kelly: Yohji, 2004, oil on linen; courtesy Kevin Kavanagh Gallery Limerick. to follow accurate chronologies of the artist’s knowingly self-conscious cull. progressions of thought and their Within their respective artistic Mark O’Kelly: In Fashion, Limerick filtration into his painting practice. practices both O’Kelly and Pierce City Gallery of Art, January O’Kelly, a self-professed hoarder, explore editorial behaviours and –-February, 2005 is a meticulous one. Poring over individual and collective respon- the available evidence, no dog-ears sibilities in the fabrication of

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 93 Limerick: Mark O’Kelly at Limerick City Gallery of Art

Mark O’Kelly’s oeuvre to date by a largely political interest in the media imagery, such as magazine has been a carefully considered connotations of the aesthetic inter- photographs, he autographs them developmental series of works, a change between art and design, and through a process of manipulation. feature particularly evident at his many threads of common subject In the process of synthesizing the recent exhibition, In Fashion, at matter are apparent between the final pictorial outcome, O’Kelly the Limerick City Gallery of Art. groupings of works. evidently has a long, lingering Here groups of works were clearly engagement with his canvases, defined per previous exhibitions: O’Kelly, who shows at the Kevin refining the individual composi- series of paintings were distin- Kavanagh Gallery in Dublin, has tional construction of each image. guished from each other by the an indisputable versatility with Underneath – or maybe on the gallery’s six ground-floor exhibition regard to representational painting: surface of – all the complex and spaces. If you moved from left to he has painted cityscapes, close- overlapping ideological impulses behind his works, a painterly assurance is paramount. Muted tones, frozen actions, jagged angles, bare canvas and obvious brushstrokes combine to remind the viewer that the images are painted surfaces, first and last.

The tension in Clock, 2001, indicates in Mark O’Kelly: Kandalama, 2005, oil on linen; courtesy Kevin Kavanagh Gallery a condensed manner a right through the Gallery, this facili- ups of forest foliage, crowd scenes, tension permeating many of the tated a sense of walking through life-portraits, interiors and even works. A general atmosphere of the progression of his pictorial still-lives. However, the key to anxiety was undeniable through- language over the last seven years the derivational core of his works out the exhibition and seemed to or so. The sequence was occasion- is contained within the earlier climax in the more recent works. ally disturbed by the placement of paintings shown at Limerick. The An alert paranoia pervades New works out of strict chronological intense formal concerns of his Amsterdam, 2004, a seated crowd at order – a reminder to the viewer abstract works from the late 1990s, a fashion show; Parade, 2004, is a of the overall cohesion within for example Mir, 1998, which grim-looking march of what could O’Kelly’s ongoing painted world. explores the structure of a painting, equally be displaced young refugee The work comprises an impressively has remained at the heart of his women as top models. The models eclectic mix of imagery confined work. Though he now ‘uses’ popular in Yamamoto, 2005, Ghesquiere,

94 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 2005, Balenciaga, 2005, Cristobel, their vying relationship with nature many. In Limerick, this rewarding 2005, and Yoghji, 2004, are exqui- play a vital part in perpetuating possibility was encouraged by the sitely painted and presented solo O’Kelly’s unsettling vision. His scale and range of the exhibition. in indefinite contexts evocative of viewpoint continues to move from A profoundly thoughtful artist, catwalks. Somehow, the dour pouts interiors to exteriors, include partic- O’Kelly’s insatiable research practice of these physically self-possessed ular representations and unspeci- ensures that the final products women make them seem ambigu- fied locations, in order to question that hang on the wall are decep- ously sinister and paradoxically the links between people and the tively still. Each painting contains vulnerable. The seduction of the commercial centres they create, a myriad of ideas and celebrates a sheer opulence of the glamour and all the historical intercultural pleasure in paint, while in exhibi-

Mark O’Kelly: New Amsterdam, 2004, oil on linen; courtesy Kevin Kavanagh Gallery world becomes, in part, compro- baggage that attends these links. tion, as a series of representations, mised by the various contemporary they are anything but straightfor- militaristic implications lurking These works are not easily read. ward. behind the examples chosen by Uncertainty about what has O’Kelly. happened, what may happen and Niamh Ann Kelly is an art writer the undisclosed significance of and lecturer at the Dublin Institute The generic grid quality of the the places, times and situations in of Technology. urban scenes, from Bellevue, 2002, O’Kelly’s works leave the viewer to Johannesburg, 2005, suggests to consider and reconsider the Mark O’Kelly: In Fashion, Limerick a disquieting western homogeny paintings, and furthermore to City Gallery of Art, January of modern architectural space. reconstitute the interrelationships –-February, 2005 Ominous-looking buildings and among them, of which there are

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 95 Dublin: Royal Art Lodge at Douglas Hyde Gallery

of the show at the first venue of a tour, and copies of the first edition were appearing on eBay at four times their original selling price. Rarely does art practice generate this sort of frenzied cult following, perhaps with the notable exceptions of Warhol and Pettibon.

But what lasts? After only a few years (of punishing success, it must be said), many of the original members of the Winnipeg collective have already gone, leaving The Royal Art Lodge: Madam, come with me, we are murdering your husband, 2005, mixed media on panel, 15.24 x 15.24 cm; courtesy Douglas Hyde Gallery the obviously talented Neil Farber and the I must admit to being a fan of show Ask the Dust at the Drawing elegant craftsman, and apparent the Royal Art Lodge and was duly Center, New York (Jan-March, 2003) spokesperson, Michael Dumontier, excited by the prospect of Serpentine I, and half of the artworld, were as RAL mainstays. The odd postal Musings at the Douglas Hyde thoroughly ‘wowed’ by the freshness contributions from the cult superstar Gallery. However, my enthusiasm and diversity of their collaborative Marcel Dzama appear separate now has been somewhat countered by and individual work. The show was (literally stuck on as afterthoughts), the speed at which their idiosyn- packed to the rafters with drawings, where initially his quirky vision cratic and marginal practice appears dolls, models, videos, costumes, and and powerful imagination were to have conformed to art-market miscellaneous objects, all of which central to the drive and aesthetic of orthodoxy. resonated with a thoroughly engaged the group. Dzama’s career has gone presence of performativity. The stratospheric in just a few years and On first seeing their compelling catalogue sold out before the end he has made the obligatory move to

96 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 Manhattan, where market pressure and highly engaging mayhem of the Musings has no such diversity, and seems to be easing his work away Drawing Center. This is clearly not loads the individual paintings with from its self-evident home, as water- a smart move, and struggles in the the pressure of being read in the colour on paper (which unfortu- cavernous space of the Hyde. Nor tradition of the masterpiece culture. nately has a price-ceiling), towards is it just due to the usual rigours of It is debatable as to whether they can the more lucrative (but less success- Hyde installing, although a selection sustain this, as many pieces depend ful) paintings. Similarly, Farber is of works by the individual artists of upon the fading process of collabo- increasingly evolving a popular the Royal Art Lodge, for potential ration to support uneven ideas and solo career and will undoubtedly inclusion, was over-reduced to one visuals. Certain pieces stand alone, duplicate the success of Dzama, and piece per artist in the final hang. A such as the haunting Madam, come it may end up with me, we with Dumontier are murdering holding together your husband, a creaking ship. but too many The other recent of the others oddity (and I blend into would imagine formal habits a potentially which miss out divisive one) on the genuine was the showing invention of of The Royal earlier, truly Family at Richard collaborative Heller Gallery pieces. This is in Santa Monica a valuable and (November worthwhile –-December, exhibition, in 2004), wherein that it contains Dzama made many good collaborative individual works with his works, and sister, Holly (an I am aware early member of that too many the Lodge), his of my criti- wife Shelley cisms may be Dick, his predicated on parents Maurice The Royal Art Lodge: Untitled, 2004, mixed media on panel, 15.24 x 15.24 cm; an unsustain- courtesy Douglas Hyde Gallery and Jeanette, able past, but and uncle, Neil it remains an Faber. recent RAL show at Houldsworth unsatisfying show. The Dialectic of in London developed exactly the Enlightenment teaches us that too How can the RAL prevent these same linear-hang strategy, which much success, too quickly, is stalked obvious and worldly pressures from ultimately, and very ironically, by the shadow of potential failure. bursting their bubble, which is predi- foregrounds the individual work cated on a removed, otherworldly over the collective hive, or collec- David Godbold is an artist and innocence? And where specifically tive conceptual meaning. Whilst this lecturer, based in Dublin. does all this leave the Douglas Hyde show introduced the small-painting show? Exactly eighty six-inch-square format, it did, however, benefit The Royal Art Lodge, Douglas Hyde panel paintings hang in a neat from half the works being drawings Gallery, Dublin , February – April line around the gallery, forming a – the real centre of RAL practice for 2005 distinctly un-visual installation, in my money – and the full creative comparison to the well-organised engagement of Dzama. Serpentine

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 97 Art Spiegelman: In the Shadow of No Towers

tower of the World Trade Center left me reeling on that faultline where World History and Personal History collide.” Like Maus, In the Shadow of No Towers is set on the site of this violent encounter between individual and political histories; it is a place of genuine trauma and unspeak- able loss, where shards of memories and fragments of thought puncture, overlap with and disrupt each other. Its affective eloquence provides, along with Maus and the work of Art Spiegelman: from In the Shadow of No Towers; courtesy Pantheon Books Jacques Tardi, Marjane Satrapi In the Shadow of No Towers opens invasions by Martians and Marxists, and Joe Sacco, with a personal statement entitled but they also declare that this time, compelling evidence that the comic The sky is falling! The phrase looms in the face of palpable, overwhelm- book may be uniquely suited to like a headline over a two-column ing violence, no amount of fear is handling historical trauma in ways text disrupted by a circular drawing too small. In the essay, Spiegelman that resist its appropriation and of terrorized faces. The slightly comments on his own shift from reduction to, in Spiegelman’s words, anachronistic style of the drawing excessive worry to legitimate panic: “a war-recruitment poster.” (one square-jawed man is so “Before 9/11, my traumas were shocked, his Fedora hovers above all more or less self-inflicted, but As its title suggests, In the Shadow his head) and its vibrant, screaming outrunning the toxic cloud that had of No Towers deals with the death colors recall Cold War hysteria over moments before been the north and destruction that resulted from

98 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 the previously unimaginable act of the links between a national push to a brief history of comics, complete flying commercial jets into the two ‘move on’ emotionally and the Bush with reproductions of early series 110-storey skyscrapers that once Administration’s rush to war with like Krazy Kat, Happy Hooligan and dominated lower Manhattan, but the wrong nation; on a visual level, Little Nemo in Slumberland. The it also addresses the subsequent where panels and images overlap selections themselves make up an cynical co-optation of that trauma and obscure each other, defying the interesting collection of representa- by the Bush Administration and left-to-right / top-to-bottom rules of tions of violence and ethnic stereo- the disturbingly submissive silence Western reading; and thematically, types, as characters set off dynamite, of the U.S. news media. In fact, it where Spiegelman resurrects charac- destroy skyscrapers, don black-face was media from the “old Europe” ters from early-twentieth-century to impersonate Arab princes and of Rumsfeld’s cranky rants that first comic strips to stand in for himself worry about the collapse of the welcomed the No Towers-strips, and his contemporaries. After their leaning Tower of Pisa (that last one when Die Zeit offered Spiegelman death, the Towers themselves are re- was Jiggs, the Irish immigrant from the freedom Bringing up to do a full- Father, who is page color – of course – in newsprint series construction). on any subject The presence he chose. The of these comics oversized broad- together with sheet format, Spiegelman’s Spiegelman own work form notes, seemed the kind of particularly historiography well-suited at which he is to “outsized particularly events.” adept – first- person accounts The book’s that are acutely recurring image aware of the is a computer- catastrophic enhanced one side of life of the glowing and admirably ‘bones’ of the reluctant to north tower place trauma just before it into the heroic disintegrated, narratives that an image that ultimately evokes the Art Spiegelman: from In the Shadow of No Towers; courtesy Pantheon Books bolster a ashes (human dangerous form and other) of ‘patriotism’ that hovered over New York and animated as the Katzenjammer kids, or, as it used to be called over here, captures the lingering ‘phantom limb’ who try in vain to outrun destruc- nationalism. effect of the towers’ absence. Here, tion. as in Maus, Spiegelman expertly Jessica Scarlata is currently a Visiting expresses the alternate temporal- In the Shadow of No Towers marks Assistant Professor of Film and ity of trauma, its stubborn refusal Spiegelman’s first return to comix Media Studies at Florida Atlantic to submit to a linear history. This (a spelling he uses to describe the University. anti-linearity repeats through- co-mixing of words and images) out the book: on a narrative level, since the publication of Maus, and Art Spiegelman: In the Shadow of where Spiegelman worries about the second half of the book offers No Towers, Pantheon Books, 2004

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 99 Belfast: Visonic at Ormeau Baths Gallery

A festival of music, art, film and improvised music ensembles, most occupied the gallery. Inside was technology, Visonic drew together a notably with Catalan composer an inverted video projection of diverse range of practitioners from and toy instrumentalist Pascal an aerial set into the lough, with these fields in a series of events Comelade’s Bel Canto Orchestra. stories related to the area woven across Belfast, Coleraine and Derry. in with field recordings and radio The Ormeau Baths was home to The child-like simplicity of waves. There was a lot of material an exhibition that seemed to have Bastien’s orchestra, with its naïve to contend with here, which could no discernible theme other than melodies and rudimentary rhythms, have benefitted from a bit of to draw together a few disparate draws you into a gently skewed judicious editing, especially as some strands of audio-visual activity world drenched in nostalgia. It of the sound quality was poor. The under one roof. The design of the creates an atmosphere at odds rough-hewn nature of the construc- exhibition title was the only ‘clue’ with the world around it, in refusal tion distracted from the work, as such, with its clever highlight- of it even, where the dominant which needed a more immersive ing of the letters ‘ON’ in the title to sound is that of an ever-expanding environment. suggest being plugged in, switched menagerie of infuriating ringtones. on, clued up, etc., further enhanced Like something that stepped out Initiated in spring 2002, the by the letter ‘O’, half broken by a of a Jan Svankmayer film, or Bulbes project, by French group vertical line, forming the ‘power up’ some hugely expanded medieval Artificiel, is a series of experi- icon so familiar to those comfort- clocktower chiming the hour, this ments exploring the sonic and able with computer technology. Dadaist construction was hard to visual qualities of an array of large tear yourself away from, as it went lightbulbs. Part installation, part On entering the gallery, one through a number of instrumental instrument, the lightbulb set-up is is accosted by Pierre Bastien’s combinations. Hypnotic. played in order to generate acoustic Mecanium orchestra, a jaunty resonances, as well as light. This array of traditional instruments The Centre for Media Research ingenious installation was housed from around the globe (Chinese (CMR) at the University of Ulster in a theatrically darkened space, lute, Moroccan bendir, Javanese commissioned sound artist Jem where rows of enormous pendant saron, koto, violin), all activated Finer to produce a new work for bulbs were contact-miked, and by Meccano-limbed motors that Visonic, in collaboration with Paul linked to software that generated play repeating patterns. “It’s like a Moore at CMR. Moore collected various patterns of brightening and city, where all the different cultures stories of those working and living dimming. This created rhythms blend: you get a richer palette of on Lough Neagh, those on seasonal very reminiscent, in part, of the sounds,” Bastien once remarked. wages, waiting for ‘The Dark’ when music of Finnish group Pansonic, As a double bass player in the eels migrate. whose work has an innate feel ’70s, he was part of the strong for the purity of electricity. This countercultural movement of the As a child, Finer used to imagine element was made both visible and time in France, playing alongside everything in Australia was upside audible here, hardwiring the sonic like-minded musicians such as the down, held by the adult concept of and visual with elegant simplicity. oppositional maverick Jac Berrocal. gravity. He decided recently that “He used to have a band in which this still holds true, that there is no In Gallery 2 a number of videos he played all kinds of (household) up or down. So he built a fulcrum were showing. Amongst the most objects, and in one of his records for the world, to be viewed in the notable of these was the work of I had to flick tea-towels in the conditions of a camera obscura, London-based Irish artist Paddy air !” recalls Bastien. He built “a sculpture to mark the position Jolley, whose film brought us into a the first Mecanium in 1976, as a of the north and south poles, the world apart. In a decrepit domestic throwback to childhood, and has hinges on which the earth spins.” interior two people are attempt- been developing various construc- ing to go about mundane tasks tions since then, playing in different A garden-shed-type construction while the furniture sprouts flames

100 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 around them. A man nonchalantly called Chillout 3000. “Using form of tyre tracks, and the steady whacks at the fire on his chair with advanced vibration technology a accumulation and thawing of snow a newspaper. A group of covered suspended metal plate is turned which seems to erase and then kneeling figures are crawling in into an interactive loudspeaker, reveal the landscape. Operating on the door while the fire increases creating an intimate futuristic chill- the fringes of perceptible changes, its purchase on the house and out experience.” This kind of dated Köner gives us a perspective on the things start collapsing. The bed wording is pretty offputting. With landscape that is subtle to the point of a sleeping figure is engulfed pithy precision, JG Ballard summed of almost disappearing, but is all in flames. It begins to snow. The up his attitude to the future by the more powerful and engaging action has been rendered dream- saying, “The future is boring.” For for it. like by slowing the film, and the all its ‘advanced technology‚ this colour has been bled in a manner work shunted me back more than a “The mystery of the world is in the quite reminiscent of Tarkovsky decade, as I lay on a bean mattress visible, not the invisible.” (Wilde) (the whole scenario is like a dream inches from a drone-emitting sequence in one of his films). An curved metal plate, hemmed in by Fergus Kelly is an artist living in intriguing and memorable work. a six-foot-high, white lycra corral Dublin. (not unlike the work of Ernesto A video by Vincent O’Callaghan, Neto). Low-rent James Turell, Visonic, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Otto Schlindwein and Damien without the sensory displacement. Belfast, February 2005 Duffy, called Exit, stalked similar territory, as the camera hovered Amongst the videos showing around an attic space in a Victorian upstairs, the work of Thomas house prior to demolition. Inside Köner stood head and shoulders the room were projections of what above the rest. Köner made a name seemed to be shots of the same for himself in the ’90s by creating interior overlaid on walls and albums of incredibly pared down windows, in uneasy juxtaposition, soundscapes based on recordings as though time was collapsing in of close-miked gongs and cymbals. on itself. He had a fascination with the arctic, and evoked this landscape power- Vicki Bennet (aka long-running fully in his work. This was chillout plunderphonic project People Like in the most literal and profound Us) has “combined audio and video sense. He also worked with UK to create something completely sound sculptor Max Eastley and new with dadaist samplings and Australian composer Paul Schutze. reshuffling of cultural oddities.” A bit of an inflated claim, and very The video on show was Banlieue much the sum of its parts, this du vide (2003). This remark- video played with a lot of B-movie ably understated work took static footage from the ’40s and ’50s in a shots of snowbound streets at manner not far removed from the night and blended them in a series scratch-video technique popular in of incredibly mellifluous cross- the ’80s, which seemed to say little fades, combined occasionally with more than “hey ! aren’t these people acoustic passages of polyphonic naff ?” Old hat. white noise and the sounds of playing children. These are public In an adjoining room, Brussels spaces voided of human presence, collective Foton showed a work save for the traces left behind in the

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 101 Cork: Visual Practices across the University at Lewis Glucksman Gallery

What counts as a picture? What or indeed the matters in an image? Who studies field, and this images? Can scientific images be is what makes as rich as art images? These are the debate just some of the questions that this stimulating and exhibition seeks to answer. However useful. For the ,‘exhibition’ here needs to be purposes of qualified. This is in effect a ‘thesis’ this exhibition, show. It is the curator, art historian Elkins’ contri- and academic James Elkins’ thesis, bution and which he has elaborated most argument is recently in Visual Studies: A worth rehears- Skeptical Introduction (2003). In ing here. In addition, the coincidence of this its interest exhibition with a two-day confer- in exploring ence on Visual Literacy should not visuality, be dismissed. This featured some he argues, very prominent academics, namely visual studies Barbara Stafford, W.J.T. Mitchell challenges and Jonathan Crary, in what is an the manner emergent field. So it might seem at in which first sight that the mode of address knowledge of this exhibition is something like a production seminar paper. in universi- ties since the The coupling ‘visual culture’ is used Enlightenment in both relaxed and restrictive inter- has been pretations. The speed with which it disjointed and has been adopted as an umbrella term dispersed. He for a whole series of interdisciplinary calls visual activities, areas, methods, domains, studies, “the is only matched by the generous study of visual flexibility of its reach and colonizing practices across vision. So it is worth rehearsing what all bounda- the general terms of the debate are in ries,” and it what is becoming the fastest-growing is precisely academic industry this side of the productive as humanities. For example, Mitchell it “does not argues, “…it’s useful at the outset to know its distinguish between visual studies subjects but Nollaig Parfrey: Human kidney biopsy, exhibiting signs of membranous glomerulopathy; haematoxylin and eosin stain; from and visual culture as, respectively, the finds them Visual Practices across the University; courtesy James Elkins field of study and the object or target through its of study. Visual studies is the study of preoccupa- western objects and phenomena. visual culture.” tions.” Elkins also points to the It must include scientists in the emerging field being stifled by a expansion and widening of this However, as with all emerging narrowness of scope in using the scope. His argument is that visual fields, there is no real consensus on stock canonical texts and authors studies needs to take science what it is that constitutes the object and rarely venturing beyond non- seriously as science as, he says

102 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 from Geology, Geography, Zoology, Physics, Dentistry, Law, Linguistics, Speech Therapy, Economics, Art History, Performance Studies, amongst others. The admittance criterion was that the visual material was not used in formal commu- nications or PR but through the actual work and research produced and activities of the depart- ment. Comprising of printouts, screengrabs, photographs, video, documents occasionally framed / mounted but mostly presented in the ‘rawest’ of forms, some literally tacked onto the wall, their possible aestheticisation is offset. The no- budget aesthetic is matched by accompanying texts which offer a context and explain in some cases what it is the viewer is actually looking at, the technologies employed, etc.

If Elkins wants us to read these images then inevitably we are re- directed to the explanatory texts that in some instances literally surround and enclose these images. However, more than that, he wants us to –-rather than appropriate them in some aestheticising gesture (the “isn’t that pretty” response) –-in effect, move into the discur- sive space or explanatory frame of their original contexts and think about how images work or are read from whence they came. This is not altogether an easy task. The salutary Nollaig Parfrey: Human kidney biopsy, exhibiting signs of aspects of this ambition are to membranous glomerulopathy; haematoxylin and eosin stain; from Visual Practices across the University; courtesy James Elkins “probable truth, of use in under- demonstrate and enact this move. denaturalize the habitual visualities standing vision and visuality, rather Seeking out a diverse range of and sensory experiences of gallery than as social construction.” This is University College Cork’s depart- visits, but not in some Duchampian elaborated in the exhibition. ments’, programmes’, researchers’ vanguardism, instead more to alert use of visual images in their work, viewers to the ordinariness of these Elkins has produced a survey (his Elkins has collected and displayed so-called visual practices from these favoured mode) of the “visual them in the premier art gallery respective fields. For instance, the practices across the university” to of the city. These include images use of images that do not submit to

CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 103 some tradition of perspectivalism he terms the “art ghetto,” as if in image ‘correctly’. –-e.g. data maps of deep space that mock disavowal. This in substance read right to left represent space but amounts to images of Odysseus on This exhibition amounts to an when read up and down represent a journal cover (Economics), John extended ‘show and tell’ session velocity –-is troubling and a Heartfield’s graphic and book design which is light on the analytical conundrum to your average viewer. (Art History), and the documenta- and occasionally courts precisely tion of performance art (Drama the ‘wow’ factor which it seeks to supercede. It may seem an improper question, but what does it mean to ask these questions in the age of ‘shock and awe’ media? Just as the virtual recon- struction of Glenfada Park, Derry, in the Bloody Sunday multimedia piece begins to resemble what is now the mise en scène for ‘shoot’em up’ games –-for example, the urban environ- Marc van Dongenfrom: part of a graphical solution to Lewis Carroll's famous ‘Zebra Problem’; from Visual ments of Practices across the University; courtesy James Elkins Fallujah or Sadr City –-we are reminded of The fact that most of the images and Performance). However, the what the late Susan Sontag referred on display are not the result or inclusion of the ‘memory jogger’ to as “an ethics of seeing.” end-product of the processes of multimedia technologies from the investigation but a point along the Saville Enquiry into Bloody Sunday Martin McCabe is a lecturer in the way, which is no more significant next to dental prosthetics and scans School of Media, DIT than numerical data, demonstrates of geological substrates runs the risk these images’ instrumental or use of a kind formalism that reduces Visual Practices Across the value which is very different to the and essentialises, if not in some University, Lewis Glucksman way art historians look at images. medium-specific way, to a kind of Gallery, University College, Cork, Indeed, Elkins has a tendency to technical activity (which is probably April –-June 2005 play the provocateur, adopting the point). What saves this from the mantle of the skeptics’ skeptic. becoming so is the reconstructive His placement of what might and contextual power of the text to pass for the ordinary fare of the offer the viewer the kind of inter- gallery is cordoned off in what pretative frame required to read the

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